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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



HEROES OF ALL TIME 



FIRST VOLUMES 



Alexander the Great. By Ada Russell, M.A. 
(Vict.) 

Alfred the Great. By A. E. McKilliam, M.A. 

Augustus. By Rene Francis, B.A. 

Jeanne d'Arc. By E. M. Wilmot-Buxton, 
F.R.Hist.S. 

Mohammed. By Edith Holland. 

Robert Louis Stevenson. By Amy Cruse. 

Sir Walter Raleigh. By Beatrice Marshall. 

William the Silent. By A. M. Miall. 



Other volumes in active preparation 




R. I.. S. IN THE SOUTH SEAS 



ROBERT LOUIS 
STEVENSON 



BY 

AMY CRUSE 



With Frontispiece in Color and Eight 
Black-and-White Illustrations 




NEW YORK 
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright, 1915, by 
Frederick A. Stokes Company 



All Rights Reserved 




August, 1915 



JL'L 20 1915 



'CI.A4U1833 



Acknowledgment 



iJ ^ li 



THE author and publishers acknowledge with 
thanks the kindness of Messrs. Charles Scrib- 
ner's Sons, who have permitted the use in this % '• '' 
volume of copyrighted material from various 
works of Robert Louis Stevenson published by 
them. 



[v] 



Contents 



CHAPTEB PAGE 

I. A Family of Engineers 13 

II. Childhood 25 

III. Preparing for a Profession .... 40 

IV. Wander-Years 59 

V. California 76 

VI. In Search of Health 92 

VII. America and the South Seas ... 116 

VIII. Vailima 146 

Epilogue: The Writer and the Man . 185 



[vii] 



Illustrations 



R. L. S. in the South Seas .... Frontispiece v 



FAGB 



Stevenson's Father 20^ 

R. L. S. and His Mother 26 

Swanston Cottage 46 ' 

"Cummie" 64^- 

Portrait of Stevenson at VaiHma 102 ^ 

Father Damien 132 

The Residence at VaiHma 148 

The Family and Household at Vailima . . 162 



[«] 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



CHAPTER I: A Family of 
Engineers 

THE history of English literature on its 
biographical side serves to show how few 
of our great writers have come of a 
literary stock. In one instance after another the 
same story is repeated; a strong and virile race, 
following some active occupation, produces at a 
certain stage a man or woman who provides it 
with means of expression; and, though this is 
probably mere coincidence, the branch of the 
family thus distinguished has a way of soon after- 
ward dwindling and dying out. Chaucer came of 
a family of vintners, Shakespeare of a family of 
yeomen. Sir Walter Scott had behind him a long 
line of Border * cattle-lifters.' Thackeray's imme- 
diate ancestors were India merchants, George 
Eliot's were carpenters and builders, and Robert 
Louis Stevenson's father, grandfather, and great- 
grandfather were engineers. Instances might be 
multiplied, but these may suffice; and the con- 
clusion seems to be that in the race as well as in 
the individual, literature, if it is to be strong and 
living, must be in the closest touch with life. 

In Robert Louis Stevenson the conception of a 
man as the product of forces that had gathered 
through the long line of his ancestors was pecu- 
liarly vivid. He looked back past his more imme- 
diate progenitors and saw behind them in the dim 
distance the figures of certain Highland chiefs of 

[13] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

the clan Macgregor, who, tradition said, were the 
founders of his race; and he saw the traits of these 
chiefs perpetuated through the company of "de- 
cent, reputable folk, following honest trades," who 
came after them. "I cannot conceal from my- 
self," he said, "the possibility that James Steven- 
son in Glasgow, my first authentic ancestor, may 
have had a Highland alias upon his conscience and 
a claymore in his back parlour." This James 
Stevenson had a son, Robert, who became a malt- 
ster, and the father of ten children; and one of 
these, Alan, was Robert Louis' great-grandfather. 
He left behind him when he died, a widow and a 
little son two years old, who was to become the 
most famous of a line of engineers. 

Through all these Stevenson traced the gather- 
ing up of the 'component parts' that were to coa- 
lesce in the making of himself, their descendant. 
He looked back also over his ancestors on his 
mother's side, and saw a certain part of himself 
in that James Balfour, minister of St. Giles', 
Edinburgh, who was one of the divines who with- 
stood James VI in his design of establishing Epis- 
copacy in Scotland; and in that later James 
Balfour who became Professor of Moral Philoso- 
phy in the University of Edinburgh, and took for 
his wife one of the clan of the Border Elliots. 
Through this ancestress Stevenson claims that he 
has "shaken a spear in the Debatable Land, and 
shouted the slogan of the Elliots." Her grand- 
son was Lewis Balfour, who became minister of 

[14] 



A Family of Engineers 

the parish of Colinton, and whom, in his old age, 
his own grandson held in reverence and dread for 
his stately bearing, the cold aloofness of his man- 
ner, and his strict views on discipline. "Try as 
I please," says Robert Louis Stevenson, "I cannot 
join myself on with the reverend doctor, and all 
the while, no doubt, and even as I write the 
phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers 
words to me, and sits efficient in the very knot 
and centre of my being." ^ 

But it was not any of these who had the chief 
voice in deciding what manner of man this de- 
scendant of theirs should be. It was a certain 
*lamp and oil man' who, at about the time when 
the future minister of Colinton was a young stu- 
dent at Edinburgh University, lived with his wife 
and five small children in his shop beside the Tron. 
He had at that time no connection with the Stev- 
enson family, and his name was the unremarkable 
name of Thomas Smith. He was, however, not 
an entirely unremarkable man. He was clear- 
headed and energetic, and his nature was at once 
immensely practical and immensely enthusiastic. 
His ardour for business led him into various com- 
mercial projects, and these all prospered. He was 
no scientist, but his keen, practised intelligence 
carried him into the scientific paths of invention 
and discovery. He designed a system of oil lights 
to supersede the primitive coal fires then used in 
lighthouses, and as a consequence of this he was, 

1 Memories and Portraits, "The Manse." 

[15] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

in August 1786, made engineer to the newly 
formed Board of Northern Lighthouses. 

It was about a year after this new appointment 
had changed the character of Thomas Smith's 
interests and occupations that he married Mrs 
Alan Stevenson, of whom something has already 
been said. Twelve years had passed since the 
death of her first husband, and during those years 
she had fought a brave fight with poverty and had 
striven desperately to give her son Robert such an 
education as would enable him to become a minister 
of the Scottish Church. But the lad did not share 
his mother's ambition. He had no zeal for learn- 
ing, and though he was not a dunce, he failed 
to distinguish himself in any way as a scholar. At 
the time of his mother's marriage the motive power 
that was to shape his life was yet to seek. 

The marriage brought two families together 
under one roof, and in the household thus formed 
new forces of influence and attraction were soon 
at work. Thomas Smith's two eldest daughters, 
Jean and Janet, gentle, pious, unworldly girls, 
gravitated naturally toward their gentle, pious, 
unworldly stepmother, and the three entered upon 
a mildly busy life, full of church-going and kind 
deeds, of sanctimonious intimacies and edifying 
correspondence with devout but unfortunate peti- 
tioners. Robert, on the other hand, quickly took 
fire at the glow of his stepfather's enthusiasm, and 
the calling of a lighthouse engineer became the 
one calling in the world for him. The romance 

[16] 



A Family of Engineers 

of a life so full of adventures in unknown seas, of 
dangers by storm and shipwreck and savage men, 
of stern encounters with the forces of nature, of 
hardly won victories, took hold on the boy's imagi- 
nation, and his ambition was fired by the possi- 
bility of great achievements. Henceforward his 
delight in his profession was "strong as the love 
of woman." At nineteen he had advanced so far 
as to be appointed to superintend the construction 
of a lighthouse on the isle of Little Cumbrae 
in the Firth of Clyde; and from that time his 
record shows a steady progress from one great 
work to another. During the summer months of 
each year he was engaged in the active work of 
his calling; in the winter he laboured with a zeal 
that his student days had never known to im- 
prove himself in mathematics, chemistry, natural 
history, agriculture, moral philosophy, and logic, 
sitting "a bearded man among boys" in the class- 
rooms of the University of Edinburgh. In 1799, 
when he was twenty-seven years old, he married 
his stepfather's daughter, Jean Smith. By this 
"extraordinary arrangement in which," says his 
grandson, "it is hard not to suspect the managing 
hand of a mother," Thomas Smith was brought 
into blood relationship with the later Stevensons. 
The marriage was a happy one, though the two 
had few interests or ideals in common. The hus- 
band was a busy, active man of the world, enam- 
oured of his calling and ambitious of gaining 
distinction in it. He succeeded, and his success 

[17] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

raised him to a social sphere higher than that of 
his fathers, where his associates were men of posi- 
tion and culture. The wife remained what she 
had always been, a pious, mild-natured, kindly 
woman, interested only in her religion, her chil- 
dren, ^nd her home, the natural prey of 'godly' but 
inefficient servants and tradespeople; yet devotedly 
loved by the husband and sons who smiled with 
tender amusement at her small weaknesses. 

In 1807 Robert Stevenson succeeded his step- 
father as sole engineer to the Board of Northern 
Lights, and in this capacity he established a kind 
of patriarchal rule over the lighthouse-keepers and 
workmen under his authority. He made himself 
dreaded by his insistence upon exact obedience to 
the rules that he laid down, and loved for the 
staunchness with which he upheld the interests of 
his scattered family and the sympathy he showed 
with their troubles. The slack lighthouse-keeper 
who had not brought the appointments of hr^ 
charge to that perfection of cleanliness and bright- 
ness which Mr Stevenson required trembled when 
the engineer's boat was sighted; and the man who 
had ideas of his own grumbled at the minuteness 
of supervision that regulated even his domestic 
arrangements. But if these men were in trouble, 
if their sons wanted a helping hand, or if illness 
had wasted their resources, it was to this stern 
martinet that they came, with the assurance that 
he would listen and do his best to help them. At 
his house in Edinburgh, No. 1 Baxter's Place, any 

[18] 



A Family of Engineers 

man employed by the Northern Lights was always 
heartily welcome, and there was a constant com- 
ing and going of "odd, out-of-the-way characters, 
skippers, light-keepers, masons and foremen of all 
sorts," greatly to the enjoyment of the family of 
children who were growing up in that old-fash- 
ioned roomy, delightful dwelling. Its long garden, 
its cellars, its garrets and apple-lofts where yarns 
heard in the parlour could be thrillingly re-enacted; 
its high windows, where, with perils of darkness 
and perils of waters, lights could be planted that 
shone out over the wide and gloomy spaces of the 
Calton Hill, made it an entrancing home for a 
family of boys. The fascination of their father's 
calling was strong upon the young Stevensons. 
A sense of the romance of the sea and a realiza- 
tion of the waste and lonely places of the earth 
were theirs by inheritance. 

For thirty-six years Robert Stevenson held his 
post as Engineer to the Board of Northern Lights, 
and one after another there arose the great light- 
houses that are connected with his name. His 
first and his greatest triumph was the Bell Rock 
Lighthouse, which was completed in 1811. He 
wrote and published an account of his work and 
the book has been recognized by judges as a 
masterpiece of its sort. Once each year he made 
a tour of inspection of tJie lights, starting in the 
Government yacht froni Leith and sailing round 
the northern coast to Greenock. Sir Walter Scott, 
■"ivho, in 1814 joined the party of Commissioners 
^3^ [ 19 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

who sailed with Mr Stevenson in the yacht 
Pharos, spoke of him as "the celebrated engineer," 
and added, "I delight in these professional men of 
talent; they always give you some new lights by 
the peculiarities of their habits and studies, so 
different from the people who are rounded, and 
smoothed, and ground down for conversation, and 
who can say all that every other person says and 
— nothing more." Robert Stevenson's conversa- 
tion, as his friends record and his letters go to 
prove, was certainly not of the order of the com- 
monplace; and it combined, with his striking 
appearance — his broad shoulders, massive head, 
grand rugged face and stern eyes — to make him 
noted and remembered by all who met him. 

As his sons grew up three of them, Alan, David, 
and Thomas, became associated with him in his 
work. They were enthusiasts of the same fine 
and steady temper as their father, and when in 
1843, his health began to fail and he resigned the 
position he had held for so long, he was succeeded 
by his son Alan. For six years after this he went 
with his son on the annual tour of inspection. In 
the seventh year the decline in his health was so 
rapid that his friends tried to persuade him to 
give up the idea of taking part in the voyage, 
but he persisted in his intention until, on the very 
eve of his son's departure, the truth had to be 
told to him. He was stricken with a mortal ill- 
ness that would probably bring his life to an end 
before the cruise could be finished. The old man 

[20] 




STEVENSON S FATHER 



A Family of Engineers 

took the news firmly; he was not afraid of death 
nor greatly disturbed to know that it was near. 
"But there was something else that would cut 
him to the quick — the loss of his cruise, the end 
of all his cruising; the knowledge that he had 
looked his last on Sunburgh, and the wild crags 
of Skye, and that Sound of Mull, with the praise 
of which his letters were so often occupied; that 
he was never again to hear the surf break in 
Clashcarnock : never again to see lighthouse after 
lighthouse (all younger than himself and the more 
part of his own device) open in the hour of dusk 
their flowers of fire, or the topaz and the ruby 
interchange on the summit of the Bell Rock. To 
a life of so much activity and danger, a life's work 
of so much interest and essential beauty, here 
came a long farewell." ^ 

He died in July 1850, and his three sons were 
left to carry on his work. Each of them in turn 
filled the post of Engineer to the Board of North- 
ern Lights. Alan, with Thomas working under 
him, built that "noblest of all extant deep-sea 
lights," Skerryvore. This was one of the most 
dangerous and difiicult of any of the operations 
the family had undertaken. "It will be a most 
desolate position for a lighthouse," Scott had said 
when he had landed on the Skerryvore rocks dur- 
ing the tour of 1814, "the Bell Rock and Eddy- 
stone . joke to it, for the nearest land is the wild 
island of Tyree, at fourteen miles distance." 

* Graham Balfour's Lije. 

[21] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

This great work was completed in 1844, and the 
brothers always looked upon it as their greatest 
triumph. Thomas and David Stevenson, working 
together, "added two — the Chickens and Dhu 
Heartack — to that small number of man's ex- 
treme outposts in the ocean." They erected also 
no fewer than twenty-seven shore-lights and 
twenty-five beacons, and they built many har- 
bours. Thomas Stevenson is, however, best known 
by his inventions and improvements in connexion 
with the illumination of lighthouses. He per- 
fected the revolving light, and invented the 
azimuthal condensing system.^ He wrote several 
works dealing with the subject, and these gained 
him much fame among members of his own pro- 
fession all over the world. 

In many respects Thomas Stevenson resembled 
his father, but he added to the sturdy traits of 
the resolute and autocratic old man a melancholy, 
a rare sensitiveness, and a touch of almost painful 
humility that softened and sweetened his char- 
acter. No words can describe him so well as 
those of his son. "He was a man of somewhat 
antique strain; with a blended sternness and soft- 
ness that was wholly Scottish and at first some- 
what bewildering; with a profound essential 
melancholy of disposition and (what often accom- 
panies it) the most humourous geniality in com- 

* An arrangement of prisms by which the light proceeding from 
the flames is allocated in the different azimuths, or directions, in 
proportion to the distances at which the light requires to be seen 
by the mariner in those directions. 

[22] 



A Family of Engineers 

pany; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, 
passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, 
many faults of temper, and no very stable foot- 
hold for himself among life's troubles. . . . He 
had never accepted the conditions of man's life 
or his own character; and his inmost thoughts 
were ever tinged with the Celtic melancholy. . . . 
But he found respite from these troublesome 
humours in his work, in his life-long study of 
natural science, in the society of those he loved, 
and in his daily walks which now would carry 
him far into the country with some congenial 
friend, and now keep him dangling about the town 
from one old book-shop to another, and scraping 
romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed. 
. . . His talk, compounded of so much sterling 
sense and so much freakish humour, and clothed 
in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a 
perpetual delight to all who knew him. ... It 
was perhaps another Celtic trait that his affec- 
tions and emotions, passionate as these were, and 
liable to passionate ups and down, found the most 
eloquent expression both in words and gestures. 
Love, anger, and indignation shone through him, 
and broke forth in imagery, like what we read of 
Southern races." ^ 

It is not difficult to recognize Robert Louis 
Stevenson as the son of this man, and he was no 
less clearly the son of his mother. In 1848 Thomas 
Stevenson married Margaret Isabella Balfour, 

^ Memories and Portraits, 

[23] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

daughter of that Lewis Balfour who, as his grand- 
son imagined, may, as he "posted up the Bridges" 
to his classes in Edinburgh, have passed the 
"lamp and oilman taking down the shutters from 
his shop beside the Tron." The young student 
had grown to be a man, had taken orders, mar- 
ried, and became a zealous minister of the Scot- 
tish church. In 1823 he had come to the parish 
of Colinton, on the Water of Leith, four miles 
south-east of Edinburgh, where he was to remain 
for thirty-seven years. At the manse, as at the 
house in Baxter Place, there had been thirteen 
sons and daughters, and these, being grown to 
manhood and womanhood had gone out into the 
world, many of them to strange and far-off coun- 
tries: so that "letters with outlandish stamps 
became familiar to the local postman, and the 
walls of the little chambers brightened with the 
wonders of the East." ^ Margaret Isabella was 
the youngest of the family, and the special charge 
of her elder sister, Jane. She was a beautiful girl, 
tall, slender and graceful, and she had a bright, 
happy temperament that made friends for her 
wherever she went. From her came Stevenson's 
gaiety and brilliance, his spirit of adventure, his 
thirst for new experiences, and the charm by 
which he won his way to all hearts. "We are all 
nobly born," he once said; "fortunate those who 
know it; blessed those who remember." He indeed 
was nobly born, and he knew it, and remembered. 

1 Memories and Portraits, *'The Manse." 

[24] 



CHAPTER II: Childhood 

THOMAS STEVENSON took his wife to 
a small stone-built house known as No. 
8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, which stood 
on low ground just to the north of the Water of 
Leith. Here on November 13th, 1850, their son 
was born. He was called Robert after his grand- 
father, Robert Stevenson, who had died four 
months before his birth, and Lewis Balfour after 
his other grandfather, the minister of Colinton.^ 
The child from the beginning was delicate, with 
a weak chest, and a great susceptibility to colds. 
Even when, in 1857, the family moved to 17 
Heriot Row, which was in a less damp and ex- 
posed situation, his health did not greatly improve. 
He has told us of the terrible long nights during 
which he lay awake coughing continually, praying 
that sleep or the morning might come to his relief; 
and he has gratefully recorded how the tender 
patient care of his nurse, Alison Cunningham, 
helped him through those weary hours. "It 
seems to me that I should have died," he says, 
"if I had been left there alone to cough and weary 
in the darkness. How well I remember her lift- 
ing me out of bed, carrying me to the window, 

^ In his earliest letters, and down to 1865, Stevenson signed his 
name 'R. Stevenson.' After that he occasionally used 'R. L. B. 
Stevenson' until 1868, when he asked his mother to address him 
for the future as Robert Lewis. In 1873 he definitely changed to 
the form he finally adopted — 'R. L. Stevenson.' The change 
from Lewis to Louis was made when he was about eighteen, but 
the exact date is uncertain. 

[25] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

and showing me one or two lit windows up in 
Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; 
where also we told each other, there might be sick 
little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for 
the morning." ^ Sometimes the night hours held 
even greater terrors than these. He has told us 
in "A Chapter on Dreams" of someone ("no less 
a person than myself") who from a child was "an 
ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he 
had a touch of fever at night, and the room 
swelled, and shrank, and his clothes hanging on a 
nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a 
church, and now drew away into a horror of 
infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor 
soul was very well aware of what must follow, and 
struggled hard against the approaches of that 
slumber which was the beginning of sorrows. 
But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later 
the night-hag would have him by the throat and 
pluck him strangling and screaming from his 
sleep. . . . The two chief troubles of his very 
narrow existence — the practical and everyday 
trouble of school tasks and the ultimate and airy 
one of hell and judgment — were often confounded 
together into one appalling nightmare. He seemed 
to himself to stand before the Great White Throne; 
he was called on, poor little devil, to recite some 
form of words, on which his destiny depended; 
his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell 
gaped for him; and he would awake, clinging to 

^ Graham Balfour's Lije. 

[26] 




R. L. S. AND HIS MOTHER 



childhood 

the curtain-rod with his knees to his chin." Noth- 
ing could calm the nervous terror that possessed 
him save the presence of his father; and Thomas 
Stevenson, called hurriedly to the bedside of his 
son, would sit there telling stories, inventing con- 
versations, doing all that tenderness could suggest 
to soothe the little boy's agonies, until gradually 
the fit of terror passed. Louis adored his father, 
who never petted and spoiled him, as his mother 
and nurse sometimes did, but who was tenderness 
itself in time of trouble. A word of quiet praise 
from him, made *Smout' — which was the boy's 
nickname — wild with joy, and one of his dry 
comments on some childish exhibition of petu- 
lance or vanity was never forgotten. 

Stevenson's delicate health during his early 
years made a regular school training impossible. 
When he was seven years old he was sent to a 
preparatory school, but after a few weeks he fell 
ill, and was withdrawn, and he did not return to 
school until two years later. In 1861 he was sent 
to the Edinburgh Academy, the principal school 
of Edinburgh; and he remained there for a year 
and a half, attending more or less regularly. His 
teacher was Mr D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 
a famous scholar and teacher, and the author of 
that delightful book, Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster. 
For one term, while his mother was abroad, he 
was sent to an English boarding-school in Middle- 
sex. But his school-days left very little mark 
upon him. His father, he tells us, had a "con- 

[27] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

tempt for all the ends, processes, and ministers of 
education." He despised school successes and 
encouraged his son's natural aversion to school 
tasks. His mother, indeed, felt differently: and in 
the journal she kept during these years her son's 
place in class is carefully noted. But she had 
few successes to record; Robert Louis Stevenson 
was undoubtedly an idle and lukewarm scholar. 

His true education he received at home, from 
his mother and his nurse 'Cummie.' They read 
to him and talked to him and encouraged him to 
make efforts for himself. He taught himself his 
letters by looking at the illustrated papers during 
his recovery from a severe illness, and by the time 
he was eight years old he could read and write 
fluently. Even before this he had attempted 
original composition. When he was only six his 
Uncle David offered a prize to the one among his 
children and his nephews who should write the 
best History of Moses. Louis dictated his version 
to his mother on five successive Sunday evenings, 
and illustrated her manuscript with drawings of 
the Israelites crossing the Red Sea carrying un- 
wieldy portmanteaux and smoking huge cigars. 
A Bible picture book was awarded him as an extra 
prize. "From that time forward," says his mother, 
"it was the desire of his heart to be an author." 
From this ambition he never swerved, though, 
like the rest of his family, he felt strongly the call 
to a life of adventure and active effort. He grew 
up in an atmosphere like that which had so strongly 

[28] 



Childhood 

influenced his father. All around him were people 
whose main interests were concerned with the sea, 
and whose talk was chiefly of its perils and adven- 
tures. Father, uncles, cousins — nearly all were, 
or aspired to be, lighthouse builders. All were 
proud of the triumphs the family had won, and 
not one was prouder than little Robert Louis. 
The strength of his desire to be an author is 
proved in that it entirely conquered the strong 
hereditary tendency toward the fascinating calling 
of his fathers; but the effect of this early environ- 
ment was to be seen in him and in his work to 
the end. 

His early religious training had a far stronger 
influence upon him than his purely intellectual 
education. Cummie belonged to the strictest sect 
of the Presbyterians, and under her care Louis 
spent, as he tells us, "a Covenanting childhood." 
He was made to study diligently the Bible, the 
Shorter Catechism, and the writings of the chief 
Covenanting divines. "When I was a child," 
he wrote many years afterward to Mr J. M. 
Barrie, "and indeed until I was nearly a man, I 
consistently read Covenanting books. ... I have 
been accustomed to hear refined and intelligent 
critics . . . trace down my literary descent from 
all sorts of people. Well, laigh i' your lug, sir, — 
the clue was found. My style is from the Cove- 
nanting writers." ^ 

He was taught, moreover, that novels, cards, 

* The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 

[29] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

and the theatre were traps set by the devil to 
catch souls and that the Presbyterian hymns 
were finer than all the songs of the ungodly. He 
received this doctrine eagerly, and his strictness 
in applying it exceeded that of his teacher. Cum- 
mie did her best to make the religion that she 
taught attractive to her charge, and although he 
suffered sometimes from the nervous terrors that 
attack highly sensitive children, he chiefly asso- 
ciated it with stirring and delightful experiences, 
grateful to his imagination as well as spiritually 
uplifting. "It is you that gave me a passion for 
the drama, Cummie," he once said to his old 
nurse before a roomful of people. Cummie was 
astounded and a little indignant. "Me! Master 
Lou," she answered, "I never put foot inside a 
playhouse in my life." "Ay, woman," he re- 
sponded, "but it was the grand dramatic way ye 
had of reciting the hymns." 

His taste for the drama led to one of the most 
delightful experiences of his boyhood, which he 
has described in the paper, "A Penny Plain, 
Twopence Coloured." "There stands, I fancy, to 
this day (but now how fallen!) a certain stationer's 
shop at a corner of the wide thoroughfare that 
joins the city of my childhood with the sea. . . . 
In the Leith Walk window, all the year round, 
there stood displayed a theatre in working order, 
with a 'forest set,' a 'combat,' and a few 'robbers 
carousing' in the slides; and below and about, 
dearer tenfold to me! the plays themselves, those 

[30] 



Childhood 

budgets of romance, lay tumbled one upon another. 
. . . To go within, to announce yourself as an 
intending purchaser, and closely watched, be suf- 
fered to undo those bundles and breathlessly 
devour those pages of gesticulating villains, epilep- 
tic combats, bosky forests, palaces and warships, 
frowning fortresses and prison vaults — it was a 
giddy joy. . . . And when at length the deed was 
done, the play selected, and the impatient shop- 
man had brushed the rest into the gray portfolio, 
and the boy was forth again, a little late for din- 
ner, the lamps springing into light in the blue 
winter's even, and The Miller, or The Rover, or 
some kindred drama clutched against his side — 
on what gay feet he ran, and how he laughed 
aloud in exultation! I can hear that laughter still." 
But although Robert Louis Stevenson was a 
town-bred boy his childhood held other joys than 
those of the town: and although he was an only 
child he knew something of the special delights 
that come to those who have brothers and sisters 
for playfellows. The old manse at Colinton had 
given up one generation of the children it had 
reared — all save — "Aunt Jane" — "Chief of 
our aunts" — who remained to mother a second 
generation sent home from distant parts of the 
world to fill up the empty places. When Louis 
was sent, as he often was, to recover from a speci- 
ally severe bout of illness, he found the manse full 
of coi^ins. Then began a period of purest and 
most romantic happiness. The frail, yellow-haired 

[31] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

little lad, the spoiled darling of his mother and his 
nurse, whose delicate beauty seemed to mark him 
out as a drawing-room pet, became possessed by 
such a "fury of play" as sent him to bed utterly 
exhausted. He could tell such wonderful stories 
and devise such delightful games that he was ac- 
claimed leader by the universal consent of a loyal 
and admiring following, and the glory of this posi- 
tion increased his ardour. The manse garden was 
an ideal playground. It had a lawn that on sum- 
mer afternoons was "a perfect goblet for sunshine 
and the Dionysius' ear for a whole forest of bird- 
songs"; it had delightful groups of laurels in 
whose shade small boys might lie, gun in hand, 
and await with all a hunter's pleasing tremours 
the herd of wild animals that would certainly soon 
emerge from the neighbouring cover. Along one 
side ran a gloomy pathway, whose alluring name 
was *The Witches Walk,' and this lost itself as it 
approached the stables in the black shade of a 
mighty yew tree. A walk down this path was an 
adventure, and might be depended upon to give 
the boldest-hearted boy a most enjoyable fit of 
shivers; but there were higher joys to be attained. 
The churchyard lay on a level with the top of the 
garden wall, and the children of the manse might 
hope, when night was falling, to see the 'Spunkies' 
playing among the tombstones; or might even, 
looking through a hole in the wall, spy something 
that was like a burning eye fixed upon them: and 
debate among themselves, with the most delicious 

[32] 



Childhood 

thrills of shuddering terror, as to whether it was 
really the eye of a dead man, who was sitting up 
in his coffin and taking a look at the outer world 
in this truly extraordinary fashion. Inside the 
house there were long, low rooms, admirably 
adapted for the game of 'tig,' while the dark space 
behind the dining-room sofa made an ideal bivouac 
for a lonely hunter. There was Aunt Jane's store- 
room, too, whence Albert biscuits and black-cur- 
rant jelly appeared opportunely just at that hour 
in the morning when a small boy was beginning to 
feel that the support given by the porridge at 
breakfast was failing; and there was the dark, 
cold, awe-inspiring study, where the grandfather, 
with his beautiful face and his silver hair, sat 
writing those sermons that on Sunday he was to 
deliver from the proud eminence of the pulpit. 

Sometimes one of the cousins came to bear the 
lonely little lad company in his Edinburgh home, 
and Stevenson recalls with delight the winter of 
1856-7, which the only son of his uncle Alan, 
Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, spent with him. 
The months were passed in a "purely visionary 
state," and there was scarcely one of the ordinary 
events of the day that did not provide an oppor- 
tunity for some fantastic * make-believe.' Robert 
Alan was almost as brilliant and whimsical as his 
cousin, and they played delightedly into each 
other's hands. When they ate their porridge at 
breakfast Robert Louis sprinkled his with sugar 
and feigned that it was a country suffering from a 

[33] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

disastrous snowstorm; while Robert Alan deluged 
his with milk and called upon his cousin to watch 
his gradual destruction by inundation. Their 
morning walk took them into the wildest regions 
of the earth, and sometimes into regions beyond 
the earth. The tunnel below the Edinburgh rail- 
way bridge was for them "Death's dark vale," 
and they passed it with awed faces, and minds 
braced to a brave endurance of its terrors; the 
fields near Howard Place were the "green pas- 
tures" of the Psalm, and the pools formed by the 
Water of Leith its "still waters." But their fa- 
vourite game of all was the "Game of Islands." 
In this each boy had an island of his own. Rob- 
ert Alan's was shaped something like Ireland, and 
was called ^Nosingtonia'; that of Robert Louis 
"lay like a tip-cat across the paper," and had the 
more serious name of 'Encyclopaedia.' Most mar- 
vellous things happened in both these territories. 
Hurricanes descended upon them, earthquakes 
rent them, volcanoes attempted to bury them 
under streams of lava; armies marched against 
them, hideous monsters haunted them, and mys- 
terious enemies descended upon them from bal- 
loons. The boys were never tired of inventing 
fresh trials for their unfortunate provinces, and 
this 'Game of Islands' left behind it a permanent 
interest and delight which had something to do 
later with the evolution of Treasure Island. 

Before he was fourteen years old Robert Louis 
Stevenson had visited with his parents some of 

[34] 



childhood 

the most interesting and beautiful places in Eng- 
land, France and Italy, but these seem to have 
made little permanent impression upon him. In 
none of his many autobiographical papers is there 
any mention of these journeyings; it was to Scot- 
tish scenes and Scottish people that his thoughts 
went back in after days. Of these his memories 
were extraordinarily clear and exact. He was pro- 
foundly interested in himself and in his own life; 
and looking back across the years he loved to 
watch his own small figure as it travelled on 
through those early stages of its journey, and to 
recall what the boy had thought and felt as he 
walked with his nurse vainly striving *'to piece 
together in words" his "inarticulate but profound 
impressions." "I seem," he says, "to have been 
born with a sentiment of something moving 
in things, of an infinite attraction and horror 
coupled." It is to this sentiment that the vivid, 
strenuous quality which marked his life even to 
its very end is largely due. He walked about the 
world feeling acutely that he was moving, not 
among lifeless objects, but among living realities. 
He met each experience that came to him as a 
thrilling adventure, and out of the most prosaic 
and unpromising materials could extract the pur- 
est delight. One characteristic instance of this he 
gives us in his paper, "The Lantern Bearers." 
When he was twelve years old he spent an autumn 
at North Berwick, and it was here, he says, that 
he "tasted in a high degree the glory of existence." 

[35] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

As the dark nights of September came on Louis 
and his companions bought each for himself a 
dark lantern. This was fastened to a cricket belt, 
and the topcoat was buttoned tight over it. The 
lanterns **smelled noisomely of blistered tin; they 
never burned aright, though they would always 
burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleas- 
ure of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a 
bull's-eye under his topcoat asked for nothing 
more." ^ Sometimes several of these 'lantern- 
bearers' met together in secluded places and held 
mysterious converse, but this was no real part of 
the sport. "The essence of this bliss was to walk 
by yourself in the black night . . . and, deep down 
in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you 
had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and 
sing over the knowledge." ^ 

His whole life was lived in this spirit. Each 
new day was welcomed with eagerness, for per- 
haps before it closed it would bring at least one of 
those great leaps of the heart that are followed by 
the full throbbing moments which make up man's 
real existence; the stretches of time that lay be- 
tween these he regarded, as he once said of his 
dinner, as a "mere hurried sustentation of the 
immortal spirit before exposing it to another ex- 
citement." To read a new book was, in itself, an 
event wonderful and soul-stirring. He tells us 
how, when he was eight years old, he first dis- 
covered the pleasure that could be gained by read- 

* Across the Plains, "The Lantern-bearers." ^ Ibid. 

[36] 



childhood 

ing a story-book for himself. The shock of that 
pleasure, he says, will remain in his memory 
always. A little later another book-adventure 
came with The Arabian Nights, and he tells how 
he grew ** blind with terror" when his clergyman 
grandfather came in and found him reading the 
"fat, old, double-columned volume. . . . But in- 
stead of ordering the book away, he said he envied 
me. Ah, well he might." Shakespeare gave him 
an experience more thrilling, though less pleasant. 
"One disastrous day of storm, the heavens full of 
turbulent vapours, the street full of the squalling 
of the gale, the windows resounding under bucket- 
fuls of rain, my mother read aloud to me Macbeth. 
I cannot say I thought the experience agreeable; 
I far preferred the ditch-water stories that a child 
could dip and skip and doze over, stealing at 
times material for play; it was something new 
and shocking to be thus ravished by a giant, and 
I shrank under the brutal grasp." ^ 

Nor did this emotional quality fade when he 
left boyhood behind him. When he was a young 
man, going through the Edinburgh streets to un- 
congenial work in a dull office, a vibrant note in 
the voice of a little boy calling to a dog lingered 
in his ears during the whole day, and "made me 
very happy." A clump of gigantic hemlock flower- 
ing in a public garden gave him an almost over- 
whelming sense of tropic grace and splendotir, and 
a talk with a friend — a "good talk," to use his 

* Graham Balfour's Life. 

[37] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

own phrase — heated his heart and his brain and 
made the whole physical world swim round him 
*'with the colours of the sunset." "I never was 
bored in my life," he once declared; and though 
in tracing the history of his life we often find him 
intensely sad and sometimes we find him dis- 
couraged, we never meet him in the mood that 
doubts that life is supremely worth living. 

By 1864 Robert Louis Stevenson's health had 
greatly improved, and he was able to go more or 
less regularly to a private school in Frederick 
Street, Edinburgh, kept by a Mr Thomson. He 
had, besides, various masters and tutors to help 
him in his work at home. He learned quickly 
anything that interested him, but he never really 
worked at his school tasks, nor cared greatly to 
attain any school success. His heart was not in 
his work. "All through my boyhood and youth," 
he says, "I was known and pointed out for the 
pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on 
my own private end, which was to learn to write. 
I kept always two books in my pocket — one to 
read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was 
busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; 
when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, 
or a pencil and a penny version book would be 
in my hand to note down the features of the scene 
or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I 
lived with words." ^ Ever since his literary ambi- 
tion had been awakened by the memorable History 

^ Memories and Portraits, "A College Magazine." 

[38] 



Childhood 

of Moses the boy had been thus busy, training for 
the career he had chosen. He had written epics, 
tragedies, lyrics, stories, and essays. Some of 
these had appeared in the magazines that he had 
a passion for starting and attempting to circulate 
among his school-fellows and his home-friends. 
One small pamphlet, called The Pentland Rising, 
a Page of History, 1660, attained the dignity of 
print. The subject was one upon which his father 
felt strongly, and probably for this reason rather 
than for any special literary merits the paper 
possessed, Mr Thomas Stevenson paid for its 
publication. Judged, however, as a contribution 
to literature and not as a schoolboy's essay, its 
immaturity became so manifest that he soon after- 
ward bought in all the copies he could obtain. 

This first appearance in print marks the close 
of the schoolboy period of Robert Louis Steven- 
son's life. He was now sixteen, and it was high 
time, so his father thought, that he should begin 
to prepare himself for his future profession. 



[39] 



CHAPTER III : Preparing 
for a Profession 

IT was one of the great misfortunes of Robert 
Louis Stevenson's early life that for a long 
time his family refused to take seriously his 
determination to be an author. Thomas Steven- 
son took it for granted that his son would carry 
on the family tradition and become an engineer. 
It was true that the boy had shown no aptitude 
or enthusiasm for the profession, and that his 
school career, in spite of a certain elusive bril- 
liance that made one feel he ought to do great 
things, had been disappointing. But of school 
honours his father thought little, and there was 
his famous grandfather's example to show that 
an indifferent, even an idle student might make a 
keen and efficient engineer. 

As soon, therefore, as he left school the lad was 
entered at Edinburgh University to study ior a 
science degree. He began his work in a spirit 
unenthusiastic and even rebellious. It seemed to 
him that he was being forced into a species of con- 
finement in which he must occupy himself with 
matters infinitely dull and trivial, while the world 
was simply teeming with beautiful and wonderful 
things that he longed to investigate. His univer- 
sity, like his school life, had little influence upon 
the development of his character, though as his 
essay, 8ome College Memories, shows, he was not 
without happy recollections of the place where "a 

[40] 



Preparing for a Profession 

certain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student" yawned * 
through such lectures as he could not manage to 
evade, and at last to his own wonder "escaped out 
of the stage of studentship not openly shamed." 
The streets of Edinburgh were, to his mind, full 
of an intellectual stimulus that was lacking in the 
University classrooms, and w^henever he possibly 
could he chose to take his lessons in the less con- 
fined area. He practised, he says, "an extensive 
and highly rational system of truantry," so that 
he profited very little by the teaching the Univer- 
sity offered. To induce him to work it was always 
necessary to kindle his imagination, and there was 
nothing in the college course that could strike a 
spark of enthusiasm from him. The boy was de- 
jected and out of heart — foolishly and unreason- 
ably so, perhaps, yet that made his misery none 
the less. His relations with his father grew 
strained and unhappy. Thomas Stevenson was 
puzzled at the son who, possessing, as it seemed 
certain, rare and unusual gifts, showed such intel- 
lectual apathy with regard to the subjects that 
seemed to the elder man of entrancing interest; 
and he was inclined to suspect perversity. The 
son could not conceal his resentment at his own 
strong prepossessions being entirely set aside, and 
his life forced to run upon the lines laid down by 
his father. 

Religious difficulties came to complicate matters 
still further. By this time the religious fervour 
that had marked Stevenson's boyhood had cooled. 

[41] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

An inquiry into the grounds of his faith became 
necessary, and the ardour of his temperament 
made this both full and searching. As a result he 
felt that he could no longer hold to the tenets of 
Calvinism. The strong reaction that followed led 
him to speak of matters of religion in a way that 
shocked his devout and sensitive parents; and the 
breach widened. 

The summer months, which were largely spent 
in engineering expeditions with his father, served 
only to increase the unhappy frictic^ between the 
two. The open-air life, the adventures of the sea, 
the new experiences in the wild regions to which 
his father's duties took him, gave Stevenson the 
keenest delight. No hardship or danger deterred 
him from eagerly seeking after those excitements 
which this mode of life offered. He tells us how, 
by means of a bribe of five shillings he induced 
one of the divers to allow him to descend to the 
bottom of the sea; and this experience was, he 
declares, one of the best things he got from his 
education as an engineer. He was a keen observer 
of all that interested him, and he never forgot 
what he saw in these summer excursions; but 
unfortunately the things that interested him were 
not the things that interested his father. The 
grievance was an old one. "On Tweedside, or by 
Lyme and Manor," he says, "we have spent to- 
gether whole afternoons — to me, at the time, 
extremely wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry 
to think, extremely mortifying. The river was to 

[42] 



Preparing for a Profession 

me a pretty and varied spectacle; I could not see 
— I could not be made to see — it otherwise. 
To my father it was a chequer-board of lively 
forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with 
minute appreciation and enduring interest. *That 
bank was being undercut,' he might say. 'Why? 
Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would 
not the filum fiuminis be cast abruptly off across 
the channel? and where would it impinge on the 
other shore? and what would be the result? Or 
suppose you were to blast that boulder, what 
would happen? Follow it — use the eyes that God 
has given you; can you not see that a great deal 
of land would be reclaimed upon this side?' It 
was to me like school in holidays; but to him, 
until I had worn him out with my invincible triv- 
iality, a delight." ^ 

During these unhappy, restless years Stevenson 
was much alone. He loved to walk in solitary 
places, and, in the 'divine self-pity' natural to 
youth, to brood over the hardness of his lot. He 
would stand on the great Edinburgh bridge, watch- 
ing the trains that passed beneath him, and wish- 
ing that one would bear him away out into the 
world; he would spend hours in the Calton bury- 
ing-ground, feeding his unhappiness with the 
thought of the brief space of life granted to man, 
and chafing under his own forced inactivity. If 
he had had a friend to whom he could have spoken 
freely during this period of "acrid fermentation," 

^ A Family oj Engineers. 

[43] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

some of his gloomy humours might have been dis- 
persed. But there was no one. He suffered most 
acutely from that special form of loneliness which 
is "a malady most incident to only sons." He was 
strongly attracted by one of his University pro- 
fessors, Fleeming Jenkin, but this friendship had 
not yet reached a confidential stage; and the 
cousins who had been the companions of his boy- 
hood were scattered and out of reach. His father 
and mother were willing, even anxious, to receive 
any friends of his in their house, but their son 
held aloof. He refused to enter the society of 
Edinburgh, though many pleasant houses were 
open to him; and at the few houses where he did 
visit he was not a great favourite, since the nat- 
ural charm with which, when he willed, he could 
always win friends, was hidden by the almost 
defiant unconventionality of his manner, and the 
slovenliness of his dress. 

Yet he was not without society of a sort. There 
were certain small public-houses in the poorer 
quarter of the town where he was well known. 
When he was tired of wandering about by him- 
self, he would turn into *The Green Elephant,' 
*The Twinkling Eye,' or *The Gay Japanee,' and 
sit down in the little sanded kitchen among 
a company of "seamen, chimney-sweeps, and 
thieves" — his circle, he explains being ''con- 
tinually changed by the action of the police magis- 
trate." Yet 'Velvet Coat,' as Stevenson was 
called, was always treated with consideration, 

[44] 



Preparing for a Profession 

even with a certain deference; he was petted by 
the women, and allowed to do very much as he 
liked without interference. He usually sat silent 
among the noisy talkers, writing poems in his 
penny version book, and observing the company. 
His father knew nothing of these adventures; had 
he done so it is certain that he would have very 
strongly disapproved. Yet they were, at least in 
part, the result of his own action. He held the 
strict notions of old-fashioned Scottish parents, 
and regarded his son — even after Louis had 
attained his majority — as a mere irresponsible 
boy. Therefore Stevenson, during his student 
days, was allowed half-a-crown a week as pocket 
money, which allowance was afterward increased 
to twelve pounds a year. His monthly allow- 
ance was usually spent before the day on which 
he received it was ended, a large part often going 
to clear off obligations incurred; and for the rest 
of the month he got along by forestalling the next 
payment. It was not that Thomas Stevenson 
grudged to spend money on his son. Louis was 
at liberty to order whatever clothes or other 
necessaries he chose from his parents' trades- 
people, and in the matter of holidays he was 
treated with lavish generosity. But it did not 
accord with his father's strict ideas of discipline 
to allow his son the control of any considerable 
sum, and the boy was, therefore, in a sense, driven 
to take his recreation where it could be had at a 
low price. It is probable, however, that his 

[45] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

opinions, as much as his poverty, led him into the 
society he frequented. He was at this time in hot 
revolt against the established social order, and was 
indignant at the way in which professing Chris- 
tians ignored the teaching of the Gospel of St 
Matthew; and he delighted in doing anything 
that would prove his contempt for all the barriers 
that society had set up between class and class. 

Nevertheless it is certain that however dark 
these years looked in retrospect, they were not 
wholly miserable. Stevenson spent many happy 
holidays, sometimes alone and sometimes with the 
family, at Swanston Cottage, his father's country 
house, at the foot of the Pentland Hills. He made 
friends with the country folk, he rode, skated, and 
fished; he sat and made bad verses by a little 
pool that was fed with 'a perennial teacupful' 
from Halkerside; and in winter he spent *'long, 
silent, solitary and lamplit evenings by the fire," 
renewing his acquaintance with Dumas. In Edin- 
burgh he joined the Speculative Society — of 
which Sir Walter Scott in his youth had been a 
distinguished member — and grew very enthusi- 
astic over its proceedings. He was twice elected 
one of the presidents of the Society, and he read 
various essays at the meetings of its members. 

Still, in spite of all these alleviations, the bur- 
den of uncongenial work and thwarted ambition 
became heavier and heavier. For three and a 
half years he managed to bear it; then, in desper- 
ation, he confessed to his father during a "dread- 

[46] 



Preparing for a Profession 

ful evening walk" the repugnance he felt to 
becoming an engineer, and his irresistible attrac- 
tion to literature. His father, who, doubtless, 
was not altogether unprepared for such a decla- 
ration, received it with calm and grave kindness. 
He was keenly disappointed, especially as Louis 
had, a few days before, read a paper on A New 
Form of Intermittent Light before the Scottish 
Society of Arts, and had been highly commended 
for the promise that it showed. Thomas Steven- 
son had perhaps allowed himself to hope that his 
son's interest in the calling of his fathers was 
awakening; if so, he did not let his disappoint- 
ment bring any bitterness into the discussion which 
now became necessary concerning Louis' future 
plans. He agreed that the engineering should be 
given up, but he did not consider it wise that the 
young man should devote himself entirely to 
literature. He stipulated, therefore, that Louis 
should take up the profession of Law. If, after 
his examinations were passed, he found this uncon- 
genial, the time would not have been wasted, for 
the course of study would be of considerable value 
to him in his work as an author; while, if he failed 
in literature, there would always be his profession 
to fall back upon. To this arrangement Louis, 
with a great lightening of heart, agreed. 

The worst was now over, and things began to 
mend. Other causes besides the change of occu- 
pation were working to bring Stevenson to a 
happier and more wholesome state of mind. He 

[47] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

says himself that he dates his new departure from 
three circumstances — natural growth, the coming 
of friends, and the study of Walt Whitman. 

Of his friends the chief was his cousin Bob, who 
about this time returned to Edinburgh. The two 
cousins had always been in sympathy, and they 
resumed at once the close, familiar relations of 
their boyish days. They talked long and inti- 
mately over every subject in their whole range of 
ideas, and to Louis the relief of disburdening his 
mind and speaking out all those thoughts and 
feelings the repression of which had become abso- 
lutely painful to him, was tremendous. The 
return of his cousin, he says, wrought an imme- 
diate and lasting change in his life. Other friends 
also, he tells us, he made at this period — Charles 
Baxter, James Walter Ferrier, and Sir Walter 
Simpson — all of whom had in a lesser degree an 
influence upon his life and happiness. 

Concerning the influence of Walt Whitman he 
has spoken fully in a paper contributed to the 
Comhill. "His book," he says, "... should be 
in the hands of all parents and guardians as a 
specific for the distressing malady of being seven- 
teen years old. Green-sickness yields to his treat- 
ment as to a charm of magic; and the youth, 
after a short course of reading, ceases to carry 
the world on his shoulders." ^ And, lastly, Steven- 
son tells us how the change brought about by 
natural growth worked in him. "I was never 

* Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 

[48] 



Preparing for a Profession 

conscious of a struggle, nor registered a vow, nor 
seemingly had anything to do with the matter. 
I came about like a well-handled ship. There 
stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom 
we call God." ^ 

Work now went on with better heart. Steven- 
son began his attendance at the University class 
in Law, and did fairly well, even gaining some 
distinction. He passed the preliminary examina- 
tion by virtue of his store of general knowledge 
and his ready wit rather than the amount of his 
solid information, and he worked for some months 
in the office of a firm of Writers to the Signet, in 
order to learn conveyancing. He did not neglect 
his work, but he was not devoted to it. All his 
enthusiasm was reserved for his own chosen pro- 
fession, and he laboured diligently to learn to 
write, playing "the sedulous ape" to Hazlitt, to 
Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to 
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baude- 
laire, and to Obermann. Some of his efforts he 
showed to his friends, and was in no way dis- 
mayed by their very outspoken criticisms. On 
three occasions he incurred "a more authoritative 
rebuff" by sending a paper to a magazine, but he 
accepted these simply as an indication that he was 
not yet prepared for the work he aspired to do. 

With three others of the young members of the 
'Spec' he started a magazine, which a firm of 
booksellers, whose shop adjoined the University 

^ Graham Balfour's Lije. 

[49] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

buildings was induced to publish. High hopes 
v/ere entertained of this magazine, which was to 
bring great profit to all concerned in it. It ran 
for four months, with quickly diminishing en- 
thusiasm on the part of its proprietors, and died 
*' without a gasp"; whereupon, having had the 
necessary interview with his father, and paid his 
share of the expenses, Stevenson told himself that 
*'the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready," 
and set himself again to the work of preparation, 

1873 marked an epoch in Stevenson's develop- 
ment. Early in the year the misunderstanding 
with his father reached an acute stage. Stevenson 
for several years had belonged to a mysterious 
society called the S.J.R. The significance of these 
initials was revealed only to the six members of 
the Society, and its exact tenets were also held 
secret; but it was known to advocate generally lib- 
erty of thought and freedom from prejudice. In 
February 1873 a draft of the constitution of the 
Society came into the hands of the elder Stevenson, 
who, probably regarding the sentiments it expressed 
with far more seriousness than such boyish extrav- 
agance deserved, showed his displeasure in a 
manner that awakened an answering resentment 
in his son. There was a stormy scene, followed by 
some months of painful estrangement, felt most 
acutely on both sides. 

"The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance, 
now," Stevenson wrote on February 2nd to his 
friend Charles Baxter. "On Friday night after 

[50] 



Preparing for a Profession 

leaving you, in the course of conversation my 
father put me one or two questions as to behefs, 
which I candidly answered. . . . And now! they 
are both ill, both silent, both as down in the 
mouth as if — I can find no simile. . . . They 
don't see either that my game is not the light- 
hearted scoffer, that I am not (as they call me) 
a careless infidel. I believe as much as they do, 
only generally in the inverse ratio. I am, I think, 
as honest as they can be in what I hold. I have 
not come hastily to my views. I reserve, as I 
told them, many points until I acquire fuller in- 
formation, and I do not think I am thus justly to 
be called * horrible atheist.'" ^ 

During the summer of this same year Stevenson 
paid a visit to his cousin, Mrs Churchill Babing- 
ton, who lived at Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, 
and here he made two new friends. The first 
was Mrs Sitwell, an intimate friend of his cousin's. 
She became almost at once his confidant and 
consoler, and his letters to her during the two 
critical years that followed show how, in a boyish 
yet not unmanly fashion, he depended upon her 
for sympathy and guidance. The second was Mr 
(afterward Sir) Sidney Colvin. Mr Colvin was 
several years older than Stevenson, and had 
already gained for himself a considerable literary 
reputation. He felt at once the charm of the 
immature, but brilliant, young law student, who 
expanded so delightfully under the pleasant influ- 

^ The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 

[51] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

ences of his cousin's home, and a friendship was 
formed which lasted to the end of Robert Louis 
Stevenson's life, and was of the greatest impor- 
tance both to his career and to his happiness. He 
returned to Edinburgh in September, and resumed 
his work with enthusiasm. An essay on "Roads" 
was sent to the Saturday Review, and other work 
was put in hand; but a severe attack of diph- 
theria interrupted his activity, and left him weak 
and dejected. The misunderstanding with his 
father remained a cause of acutest suffering. He 
wrote telling Mrs Sitwell of an "awful scene," in 
which his father had reproached him with cruel 
and unnatural conduct toward an old man who 
was ill able to bear it; and of the miserable night 
he spent afterward, and how he lay awake next 
morning and listened while his father with a de- 
jected step came downstairs and went out on 
some customary bef ore-breakfast errand. And he 
lay and wished — "O, if he would only whistle 
when he comes in again." 

In October Stevenson paid another visit to 
England, with the purpose of being called to the 
English Bar, but he was so weakened by illness 
and worry that almost immediately after his 
arrival in London he completely broke down. The 
distinguished physician — Sir Andrew Clark — 
who was consulted, declared him to be suffering 
from severe nervous exhaustion, combined with 
weakness of the lungs, and ordered perfect free- 
dom from work and worry, and a winter in the 

[52] 



Preparing for a Profession 

Riviera. Early in November, therefore, Steven- 
son started for Mentone. 

He had visited the place some years before with 
his mother, but this was the first time he had 
undertaken a long journey by himself, and his 
delight in the new experience partially triumphed 
over his languor and weariness. But for some 
weeks after he arrived at Mentone he was in a 
state to which no effort was possible. He could 
only bask in the sun and let the days slip by un- 
noted and unen joyed, dimly aware that he was in 
a world of beauty, but capable of receiving only 
the very faintest of impressions from his surround- 
ings. He wrote long letters to Mrs Sit well, and 
told her how the consciousness of his own languid 
state affected him; how he went each day to his 
favourite corner up in the olive yards, and looked 
upon the fair view down the valley, and on to the 
blue floor of the sea; how he watched the shifting 
colours on the olive leaves and the pleasant 
shadows that lay softly on the grass; but how 
none of these things moved him. It was little 
good being sent to the South, he said, unless you 
take your soul with you, and his was left behind 
him. His cry after the old pleasures — the thrill- 
ing encounters and soul-stirring experiences which 
he had once enjoyed — is very characteristic of 
his entire attitude toward life. "To sit by the 
sea and to be conscious of nothing but the waves 
and the sunshine over all your body is not un- 
pleasant; but I was an Archangel once." 

[53] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

To his young despair it seemed as if he had 
fallen for ever from this high estate; but as he 
grew slowly stronger, the power of thought and of 
enjoyment began to come back to him. Very 
soon he was writing that he had found a new 
friend, to whom he grew daily more devoted — 
George Sand. George Sand's novels went with 
him to his sunny corner among the olives, and 
their sympathetic and friendly tone helped to 
bring him back from the aloofness of the invalid. 
He began to take up the dropped threads of his 
life. He thought over the past few years with 
their perplexities and misunderstandings, and look- 
ing down from the height of his new experience, he 
saw more clearly where the fault had been. The 
old difficulties seemed to vanish, and the way lay 
clear before him. One thing in particular became 
plain — he could not live much longer in depend- 
ence on his father. Large sums of money were 
being spent upon his stay at Mentone, and this 
troubled his conscience. Money, he said, was the 
atmosphere of civilized life, and he could not bear 
to take the breath out of other people's nostrils. 
If his friends judged that he would never be able 
to make a living by literature, literature must be 
given up; and, much as he hated the idea, he must 
go into an office, and learn how to earn his bread 
in some humble fashion. If, on the other hand, 
he might continue his writing, he would work at 
it with all his powers. The longing to be up and 
doing came upon him more strongly than ever, 

[54] 



Preparing for a Profession 

and he was ready to cry out with joy at the least 
sign that promised recovery. In December he 
wrote to Mrs Sitwell that he was able to enjoy 
things and to feel dull occasionally, both of which 
had been impossible in his previous apathetic state. 
". . . O, I should like to recover, and to be once 
more well and happy and fit for work, to have 
done for the rest of time with preludings and 
doubting, and to take hold of the pillars strongly 
with Samson!" 

In the third week of December Colvin came to 
join him at Mentone, and his recovery in health 
and spirits went on rapidly. With a friend to 
share his enjoyment of the lovely Southern land, 
and to hold with him hour after hour intimate 
converse on the things of time and the things of 
eternity, he was perfectly happy. He made 
friends, too, with some of the people staying at 
the hotel, and had the new experience of intimate 
association with two or three delightful children. 
There was a little American girl named Marie, 
a sprite of a child, who ran about the hotel, leap- 
ing and dancing '* simply like a wave." "Both 
Colvin and I," Stevenson wrote home to his 
mother, "have planned an abduction already." 
There were two Russian children, the youngest, 
Nelitchka, or 'Nellie,' being "a little polyglot 
button" of two and a half years, who spoke frag- 
ments of six languages. These children soon recog- 
nized that the alarmingly thin young man with 
the bright eyes was not a *Madchen,' as his long 

[55] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

yellow hair had at first led them to suppose, nor 
was he a real * grown-up'; he was just a boy, who 
by some means or other had escaped from the con- 
trol of his parents. He was accordingly promptly 
admitted as a freeman of their society. He 
played with them, wrote verses to them, and 
made them presents; and they in return helped 
him to regain his place among the Archangels. 
"Kids are what is the matter with me," he wrote 
to his mother, and to Mrs Sit well. "Children 
are certainly too good to be true." 

In January he made an attempt to begin work 
again. He took up an essay on Walt Whitman 
that had been begun in the previous autumn, 
and found that he himself had changed so much 
during the interval that it was like continuing 
the work of another man. He was not yet strong 
enough to do much, but by making a start he 
seemed to bring complete recovery nearer. The 
letters of this period show that his natural gaiety 
of spirit was coming back, and his zest of small 
happenings reviving. There are many jokes about 
a cloak that Mr Sidney Colvin, who had made 
a flying visit to England, had been commissioned 
to buy for him in Paris. "The price that must be 
paid for it," he writes to his mother, "is indeed 
somewhat high," but then his parents will have 
the satisfaction of thinking that their son pos- 
sesses simply The Greatest vestment in Mentone. 

It was partly the cloak that made Mr Andrew 
Lang, who was then staying in the Riviera, and 

[56] 



Preparing for a Profession 

who called upon Mr Colvin at his hotel, say that 
Stevenson "looked nothing less than English ex- 
cept Scotch." But even without the cloak Steven- 
son was often taken for a foreigner, especially by 
the people he met in his Continental wanderings. 
He was at different times taken for a Frenchman, 
a German, and a Pole; and in An Inland Voyage 
he bewails the trials he has suffered through not 
presenting "a good normal type" of the nation to 
which he belonged. His chief divergence proba- 
bly was that the movements of his long thin body 
had a supple, attractive grace that we are not apt 
to associate with natives of England or of Scot- 
land. Mr Lang has confessed that the impression 
he gained at this time of the smooth-faced, long- 
haired, hectic young man was not entirely favour- 
able; but later on he, like almost all who came to 
know Robert Louis Stevenson intimately, felt the 
charm of that wonderfully attractive personality, 
until criticism gave way to real affection. 

Before he left Mentone in April his health 
seemed quite re-established, and he had finished 
Ordered South, — the brave essay which was the 
fruit of the victory he had won in the olive gar- 
dens among the hills, and which curiously fore- 
shadows the spirit in which much of his work, 
throughout his life, was to be done. On his way 
home he spent several weeks in Paris with his 
cousin Bob, who had begun work as an art stu- 
dent, and here he was introduced to that Bohe- 
mian artist society with which be afterward 

[57] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

became so familiar. By the beginning of May he 
was back in Edinburgh. It was a joyful home- 
coming, for illness and absence had brought 
parents and son to a better understanding of each 
other. Old differences were forgotten, and old 
grievances laid by. Stevenson settled down again 
as the son in his father's house, but certain changes 
had taken place in the position he held. He was 
now twenty-three years old, and while he had 
been abroad considerable sums of money had been 
of necessity placed in his hands. These had 
been dealt with in a way that gave him a claim 
to be regarded as a man capable of managing his 
own financial affairs. It was obviously absurd 
to think of putting him back to the old position 
of a schoolboy in receipt of pocket-money; and 
his father therefore agreed to make him an allow- 
ance of eighty-four pounds a year. This, he felt, 
was wealth; and it made him a free man. 



[58] 



CHAPTER IV: Wander^ 
Years 

FOR the next four years, though his father's 
house was still his headquarters, Stevenson 
spent comparatively little time in Edin- 
burgh. He was, he said, born a 'tramp,' and 
through all his restless youth the 'tramp' had 
chafed at being lodged in a comfortable home, and 
tied down to a daily routine. His recent rise to 
opulence had been chiefly valued as giving him the 
means to wander, and he was eager to take advan- 
tage of his newly-acquired independence. It is 
true that he was under agreement to qualify him- 
self for a lawyer, but this involved no very heavy 
obligations. It kept him in Edinburgh during the 
winter session of 1874, when he resumed his law 
classes at the University, and it brought him up 
for his Final Examination in July 1875. But 
when this was passed, and he was called to the 
Scottish Bar, the matter was nearly ended. Ac- 
cording to Scottish custom a brass plate bearing 
his name appeared upon the door of his father's 
home in Heriot Row; and he shared with three 
or four other incipient lawyers the services of a 
clerk, whom, it is said, he did not know by sight. 
He frequented the Parliament House and lounged 
about among the young and briefless advocates, 
just as Sir Walter Scott had done more than eighty 
years before. He tried to work in the Advocates' 
Library, but found the society there so disturbing 

[59] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

that he retired to his own room at home. After 
this he came to the Parliament House no more, 
and very soon all pretence of his devoting him- 
self to any calling save that of literature was 
given up. 

But even before this time he had made several 
flights from Edinburgh. In the summer of 1874 
he spent a week or two with Colvin at Hamp- 
stead, and joined the Savile Club, where he met 
some of the leading literary men of the day. A 
yachting tour round the western islands of Scot- 
land with Sir Walter Simpson, a few weeks spent 
with his parents at Barmouth and Llandudno, 
and a walking tour in Buckinghamshire, brought 
him to the winter, when, as has been said, he 
came back to Edinburgh, to take up his legal 
studies. The winter is chiefly memorable as hav- 
ing brought him an introduction to Mr W. E. 
Henley, who was to become one of his dearest 
friends. It came about through Mr Leslie Steven- 
son, the editor of the Cornhill, who was staying in 
Edinburgh for some months lecturing to the 
Royal Society. He knew Stevenson as a contrib- 
utor to his paper, and had met him at the Savile 
Club; and one day he called upon him and took 
him to visit a patient in the Edinburgh Infirmary. 
The patient was W. E. Henley. From his boy- 
hood Henley had suffered from a tuberculous 
disease that had already made necessary the 
amputation of one foot. The other leg was now 
threatened, and it was to put himself under the 

[60] 



JVander' Years 

care of the great physician, Mr (afterward Sir 
Frederick) Lister that Henley eighteen months 
before had come to Edinburgh Infirmary. 

Stevenson's account of the meeting, given in a 
letter to Mrs Sitwell, proves that he had not 
"lived with words" in vain. It is an unforget- 
table little picture. The big, burly poet was 
lying in "a little room with two beds, and a 
couple of sick children in the other bed; a girl 
came in to visit the children, and played domi- 
noes on the counterpane with them; the gas 
flared and crackled, the fire burned in a dull, 
economical way; Stephen and I sat on a couple 
of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed 
with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked 
as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, 
or the great king's palace of the blue air." ^ 

Thenceforward the two were friends, and dur- 
ing the months that followed Stevenson came 
back constantly to that unbeautiful room bringing 
with him piles of "big, yellow books quite impu- 
dently French" to shine incongruously under the 
flaring gaslight and help the brave-hearted invalid 
through his dreary days. The lonely poet in his 
almost sordid surroundings touched both Steven- 
son's heart and his imagination, and he was eager 
to pour out all that he could command before his 
new friend. Moreover, he discovered that here 
was a rare talker, — the best, his cousin Bob 
excepted, that he had ever met. Henley was a 

^ The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 

[61] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

man of strong and commanding personality. In 
talk he was "a bright, fierce adversary" who 
defended his ground foot by foot, and gave his 
opponent "full measure of the dust and exertion 
of battle." There were famous encounters held 
in that dull hospital room. With Henley, said 
Stevenson, "you can pass days in an enchanted 
country of the mind, with people, scenery and 
manners of its own; live a life apart, more ardu- 
ous, active and glowing than any real existence; 
and come forth again when the talk is over, as 
out of a theatre or a dream, to find the east wind 
still blowing and the chimney-pots of the old 
battered city still around you." ^ When the 
spring came and Henley was able to leave the 
hospital the two went for drives together through 
the beautiful country round about Edinburgh, 
and to the poet who for almost two years had 
been shut up in his sickroom, the sound of rush- 
ing waters and the sight of the country "mad 
with green" came with a freshness of realization 
that was almost bewildering. "The look on his 
face," said his companion, "was wine to me." 

For the rest, Stevenson's life in Edinburgh dur- 
ing that winter went on much as it had done in 
his student days. He worked with fervour at his 
business as an author, and half-heartedly at his 
legal studies. He went little into society, and 
when he did make his appearance, with his long 
hair, well-worn velveteen jacket, flannel shirt of 

^ Memories and Portraits, "Talk and Talkers." 

[62] 



Tf^ander- Years 

dismal hue and general air of extreme shabbiness, 
the good folk of Edinburgh regarded him as any- 
thing but a credit to their gatherings. He on his 
side was constant in preferring the streets of Edin- 
burgh to its drawing-rooms. These he loved, and 
in them his finest adventures were achieved. 
*' There are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street 
lamps," he wrote long afterward, in a foreign land. 
"When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, may my right 
hand forget her cunning." He still consorted with 
the waifs and strays of the city, and did number- 
less small acts of kindness to the poor and the 
helpless. One evening as he was coming home 
at about eleven o'clock he found a lost child 
a tiny boy of three years old, who only knew 
that his name was Tommy Murphy, and that 
his parents lived in something that sounded 
like Tobago Street. Stevenson carried the child 
through the streets of Edinburgh for nearly three 
hours, seeking, with infinite patience and perse- 
verance, for the missing parents. "It was two 
before I got to bed," he wrote; then added, 
characteristically, "However, you see, I had my 
excitement." 

In July 1875, just after he had passed his ex- 
amination, he paid a visit to Paris and was intro- 
duced by his cousin Bob to the artists' colony at 
Barbizon. This "noiseless hamlet" stood deep 
in the shady groves of Fontainebleau; it had been 
the home of Millet, who was lately dead; and its 
whole neighbourhood was filled with traditions of 

[63] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

artists and their works. At Barbizon was an inn, 
known as Siron's, and this had become the head- 
quarters of a company of happy and mostly 
impecunious young gentlemen, who guarded it 
carefully from the intrusions of tourists and capi- 
talists. They had trained the innkeeper to give 
unlimited credit, and to treat the most out-at- 
elbows artist with no visible effects but his paint- 
box as an honoured guest; to allow him to remain 
as long as he chose; not to present him with his 
bill until he asked for it, and to suffer him, with- 
out question or remonstrance, to depart whither- 
soever he would leaving it unpaid. The hours 
and ways of the inn were regulated by these 
young gentlemen's requirements. They rose at 
what hour they would, found their simple break- 
fast ready, and went out into the cool, silent 
shades of the forest to paint, to write, to medi- 
tate, to join in merry excursions, or to wander in 
delightful solitude. At noon and at six o'clock 
there was a plentiful meal spread for them in the 
dining-room, whose walls were covered with pic- 
tures painted by past and present frequenters 
of Siron's; and then there was so much eating 
and drinking and jabbering in French and Eng- 
lish that it would have done your heart good, said 
Stevenson, to have listened at the door. After 
dinner came a frolic in the dining-room, when the 
old piano was played and the artists waltzed one 
with another with great enjoyment if with little 
grace; or, by the light of guttering candles in the 

C 64 ] 




'cummie' 



JVander- Years 

high inn chamber they talked the wild ambitious 
talk of youth, and jested, with light-hearted 
laughter, or sometimes took their way to the 
great city that stood so near their solitudes, and 
returning at night from its brilliant lamp-lit 
spaces, passed into "a new forest full of whisper, 
gloom and fragrance," and bathed their senses in 
the "fragrant darkness of the wood." Then back 
to Siron's, a descent into the cellar for beer or 
wine, a night of sound and dreamless sleep, and 
a new day. 

Such a life suited Stevenson's tastes exactly, 
and^ he came back again and again to the little 
village to pass his time in "strenuous idleness," 
to acquire that sense of style with which, he says, 
the very atmosphere of France is saturated, to 
dream dreams and to see in visions "the House 
Beautiful shining upon its distant hill-top." He 
was probably never happier than among the 
"solemn groves" of Barbizon and in the other 
villages scattered throughout the Forest of Fon- 
tainebleau. In the summer of 1875 he visited 
Grez, which he described to his mother as "a 
pretty and very melancholy village on the plain." 
It had a low bridge of many arches, which genera- 
tions of artists had painted, and it had an old 
tumble-down inn which rivalled Siron's in the 
warmth and courtesy of the welcome it gave to 
artists. Stevenson found Grez a "less inspiring 
place than Barbizon," though he gave it the palm 
over Cernay, with its "great empty village square," 

[65] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

and over Nemours and Moret and Chailly-en- 
Briere, and a host of others clustering close by. 

It was from Barbizon that he started with Sir 
Walter Simpson, in the summer of 1875, on that 
walk up the valley of the Loing which was, as he 
tells in his "Epilogue to an Inland Voyage," un- 
timely cut short by the action of the officials at 
Chatillon-sur-Loire. He was, he owns, "unwisely 
dressed." "On his head he wore a smoking cap 
of Indian work, the gold lace pitifully frayed and 
tarnished. A flannel shirt of an agreeable dark 
hue, which the satirical call black; a light tweed 
coat made by a good English tailor; ready-made 
cheap linen trousers and leathern gaiters com- 
pleted his array." ^ Such an appearance excited 
the suspicions of the gendarme whom he met, on 
the third day of the tour, at Chatillon-sur-Loire. 
He was stopped and politely asked for his papers; 
and none being forthcoming, he was brought before 
the commissary, ordered to be detained, conducted 
to a cellar under the gendarmerie, locked in, and 
only released upon the arrival of his companion, 
who had dropped behind on the road. "Here 
was a man about whom there could be no mistake; 
a man of unquestionable and unassailable manner, 
in apple-pie order, dressed not with neatness 
merely but elegance, ready with his passport at 
a word, and well supplied with money." ^ His 
influence sufficed for the release of his comrade, 
and the two returned by train next day to that 

^ Across the Plains. 2 J bid. 

[66] 



Tf^ander- Years 

"most unfashionable spot in Europe, Barbizon," 
and at noon were dining in Siron's, telling the 
story of their misadventure. 

After this experience Stevenson set off to join 
his parents in a stay at Wiesbaden and Homburg, 
and returned with them to Edinburgh, where he 
spent the winter and spring, attending in the 
perfunctory way that has already been described 
to his duties as an advocate of the Scottish Bar. 
He was absent during a week or two in January 
on a walking tour in Ayrshire and Galloway, and 
in the early summer he paid a month's visit to 
London. 

The great event of the year was the canoe 
voyage that he took with Sir Walter Simpson in 
September. Sir Walter was an enthusiast and 
an expert in the art of canoeing. Stevenson had 
joined his friend in the sport, and, according to 
his wont, had taken it up with fervour; but in 
spite of much practice in the Firth of Forth he 
had attained to no great degree of skill. He was 
eager for the new experience, however, and the 
two friends went to Antwerp and started for 
Brussels, then went on from the French frontier, 
by the river Oise almost to the Seine. The sea- 
son, however, was late for such an undertaking. 
Day after day the rain poured steadily down and 
the cold winds blew; yet the 'Arethusa' and the 
'Cigarette,' as Stevenson and his friend called 
themselves after their respective canoes, managed 
to get a great deal of fun out of their "inland 

[67] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

voyage." It provided, moreover, excellent ma- 
terial for one of those delightful books of travel, 
unique in their delicacy of touch, the intimacy of 
their personal note, and their delicious, unex- 
pected humour by means of which Stevenson first 
made for himself a name in literature. 

"You may paddle all day long; but it is when 
you come back at night-fall, and look in at the 
familiar room, that you find Love or Death await- 
ing you beside the stove; and the most beautiful 
adventures are not those we go to seek." With 
these words Stevenson closed An Inland Voyage, 
which he finished during the following year; and 
they were probably inspired by the remembrance 
that he had found his most beautiful adventure 
waiting for him when he came back to Grez after 
that voyage was over. He found the inn shaken 
to its foundations by news of the impending 
arrival of lady visitors. It was just at this time 
that the girl students of England and America 
were beginning to walk calmly into the inns which 
had long been sacred to the brotherhood of artists, 
and having by this outrage upon propriety and 
decorum reduced the French element in the com- 
pany to a state of bewildered helplessness, were 
being accepted by the less, or rather the differ- 
ently, prejudiced Saxon, and establishing for their 
sex a right to share the amenities of artist life in 
Fontainebleau. The visitors to Grez turned out 
to be an American lady with her seventeen-year- 
old daughter and her little son. The name of the 

[68] 



JVander- Years 

family was Osbourne, and they had come from 
California in order that the young people might 
have the advantage of a French education. Mrs 
Osbourne was an enthusiastic student of art, and 
had friends in Paris who had advised her to visit 
Grez. The two ladies are described by Mr W. H. 
Low, one of the Barbizonian group of artists, as 
slight and graceful, with delicately moulded fea- 
tures, vivid eyes, and masses of dark hair. They 
looked, he says, more like two sisters than like 
mother and daughter. 

With Mrs Osbourne Stevenson at once fell in 
love; and he did it with the finality and complete- 
ness that marked all his actions. Hitherto he 
seems to have felt slight interest in women, save 
in those who stood toward him in an almost 
motherly relation. He was nearly twenty-six 
years old, and the passion of love had never 
touched him; nor had he apparently ever sought 
to gain even that theoretical knowledge of it 
that might have been considered essential to a 
young writer's practice of his art. Yet he knew 
at once that this that he felt for Mrs Osbourne 
was the real thing, that the Great Adventure had 
come and must be followed up with a stout and 
faithful heart. 

The first step was readily achieved. It would 
have been strange indeed if the woman he loved 
had been almost the only person among those to 
whom he showed his real self to refuse to love him. 
But for a time at least the adventure could go no 

[69] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

further. Mrs Osbourne, so Stevenson learned, had 
a husband then living in California, from whom 
she had separated under painful circumstances. 
She was unwilling to apply for a divorce out of 
consideration for the feelings of her own family; 
so that it seemed likely that this new attachment 
would be nothing but a source of suffering to her 
and to Stevenson. 

For a time, however, the new element that had 
thus come into his life filled him with happiness 
and high spirits. The future, it is true, was over- 
cast, and even the present was not unclouded. 
He could see little of Mrs Osbourne, and could 
not feel that his relations with her were assured 
or satisfactory. He knew that his parents would 
look upon the whole matter with great disfavour, 
and that an estrangement more painful and more 
lasting than those that had arisen in his younger 
days was probably at hand. But to his happi- 
ness facts mattered always less than feelings; he 
was, in some directions, a supreme egoist, and the 
consciousness of this new and wonderful develop- 
ment in his own nature was powerful enough, for 
a time, to dominate his entire being. This great 
stimulus carried him through 1877, and helped to 
make this year a wonderfully productive period, 
its fruits becoming visible to the world in the 
books that appeared during 1878. In January he 
paid a visit to London, and formed one of his 
rapid and intimate friendships with Mr Edmund 
Gosse, to whom he was introduced by Colvin at 

[70] 



W^ander- Years 

the Savile Club. ** Those who have written about 
him from later impressions than those of which 
I speak," says Mr Gosse, "seem to me to give 
insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. 
It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A 
child-like mirth leaped and danced in him; he 
seemed to skip upon the hills of life. He was 
simply bubbling with quips and jests; his inherent 
earnestness or passion about abstract things was 
incessantly relieved by jocosity; and when he had 
built one of his intellectual castles in the sand, a 
wave of humour was certain to sweep in and 
destroy it." He had various whims and oddities, 
and he upheld the most absurd propositions with 
such outpourings of fantastic and brilliant argu- 
ment as highly delighted his friends. He de- 
claimed, for example, against the amassing of any 
kind of material property, declaring that such 
possessions destroyed a man's independence, teth- 
ered him to the earth, and prevented him from 
attaining complete manhood. This idea so at- 
tracted him that it seems for a time to have 
become the foremost tenet of his faith; and when, 
after a fortnight in London filled full of the stimu- 
lating intercourse with congenial minds that to 
him was the breath of life, he returned to Paris, 
he put it into practice in his own whimsical fash- 
ion. His cousin and kindred spirit appears to 
have been readily inoculated with the doctrine, 
and the two left London "with nothing but great- 
coats and tooth-brushes. It was expensive, to be 

[71] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

sure, for every time you had to comb your hair 
a barber must be paid, and every time you 
changed your linen one shirt must be bought and 
another thrown away; but anything was better, 
argued these young gentlemen, than to be the 
slaves of haversacks." Thus Stevenson in The 
Wrecker, where the brothers Stennis stand for 
himself and his cousin. Almost the whole of the 
Paris part of The Wrecker is, in fact, drawn from 
his own experience. In some moods he loved the 
great gay city better even than the leafy soli- 
tudes of Fontainebleau, to which, however, his 
true allegiance was given. 

A very large part of 1877 was spent in France, 
where Mrs Osbourne was then living, and in 1878 
he was in Scotland only for one fortnight. It was 
in this year that Mrs Osbourne returned to Cali- 
fornia, and Stevenson's gaiety and light-hearted- 
ness went suddenly out. He showed a brave face 
to the world, but in his letters there is a new note 
of gravity, sometimes of sadness. "There are not 
many sadder people in the world, perhaps, than 
I," he wrote to his father. "... I am lonely and 
sick and out of heart. Well, I still hope; I still 
believe; I still see the good in the inch, and cling 
to it. It is not much, perhaps, but it is always 
something. . . . 'Tis a strange world, indeed, but 
there is a manifest God for those who care to look 
for Him." This sounds as little like the gay- 
hearted frequenter of the Savile Club as it sounds 
like the immature atheist who had vexed his 

[73] 



JV^ander- Years 

father's soul. Stevenson passed quickly from one 
phase to another; and the * wander years,' care- 
less and irresponsible as they seemed, had yet 
been full of ripening influences that helped to 
bring him to his brave manhood. 

His literary work had, all this time, been going 
steadily on. He had written many essays and 
articles for magazines, and in 1878 his first book. 
An Inland Voyage, had been published. During 
the same year his 'New Arabian Nights and Pic- 
turesque Notes on Edinburgh were appearing serially. 
Yet with all this he had probably never made as 
much as £50 in a year by his writing, and was 
still mainly dependent on his father. He was 
often in financial difficulties, which were amusing, 
but inconvenient, but which he met with the same 
humorous courage with which he was wont to turn 
uncomfortable situations into interesting adven- 
tures. In 1877 his father placed the sum of 
£1000 to his credit, but within two years this was 
all gone, much of it in helping needy friends. 

For a time after Mrs Osbourne's departure he 
went steadily on with his work, and in September 
started on an eleven days' tour through the 
Cevennes, in company with the wayward but 
captivating Modestine, whom he bought at Monas- 
tier for sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy. 
His book. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, is 
one of his triumphs. It belongs to the same class 
as An Inland Voyage, but its style is more natural, 
its humour sweeter, its sympathy both with na- 

[73] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

ture and humanity truer and deeper. It was 
published in June 1879, when Stevenson was in 
London, writing in collaboration with W. E. 
Henley a play called Deacon Broclie, But his 
work was suddenly interrupted by the news that 
Mrs Osbourne was seriously ill in California. He 
was in a fever of uncertainty as to what he ought 
to do, and though he tried to work, and managed, 
in fact, to finish the play, the question as to 
whether he should or should not go out to Cali- 
fornia occupied all his thoughts. He could not 
bear to be separated by almost half the world 
from the woman he loved; yet to go to her seemed 
impracticable, and might prove disastrous. He 
was still largely dependent upon his parents, and 
even if it should become possible for him to 
marry Mrs Osbourne he would not be able to 
provide a home for her. Though he had had no 
serious illness for some years, his health was still 
delicate, and there was a possibility that he might 
fall ill far from home, and add to Mrs Osbou!rne's 
distresses. The few friends to whom he had con- 
fided the secret of his attachment strongly advised 
him not to go. His parents would, he knew, if 
they were consulted, oppose the project strenu- 
ously. But none of these considerations could 
weigh against the longing he felt to be near Mrs 
Osbourne again; and so, without a word to his 
parents, he arranged for his voyage. He deter- 
mined that, since he was doing something of 
which he knew his father would disapprove, he 

[74] 



JVander-^ Years 

would ask for no money from home, but would 
depend entirely on his own efforts and prove that 
he was man enough to carry out his enterprise 
without help. On August 7th, 1879, he sailed 
from Glasgow in the Devonia, bound for New 
York. 



[75] 



CHAPTER V: California 

FROM motives of economy Stevenson took 
his passage in the second cabin, which was 
"a modified oasis in the very heart of 
the steerage." The fare provided was, however, 
rather better than that given to the emigrants 
proper, and, as Stevenson gravely informs us, 
passengers of the second cabin ranked in the ship's 
nomenclature as 'gentlemen and ladies' while the 
steerage were only 'males and females.' The 
privilege on which he set most store, however, 
was that of having a table provided for writing, 
and at this table, to the immense astonishment of 
his fellow-passengers, he wrote industriously as 
often as his health allowed him. Besides keeping 
a full descriptive diary, upon which he afterward 
founded his Amateur Emigrant, he wrote during 
the voyage The Story of a Lie. He was nicknamed 
'The Writer,' and jokes of various kinds went 
round in derision of what was considered a most 
unaccountable habit. He bore all this with per- 
fect good humour, and made himself as good a 
comrade in the second cabin of the Devonia as 
in the high inn chamber of Barbizon. The com- 
pany was a mixed and certainly not a generally 
attractive one. It was largely made up of "broken 
men of England," who, having proved themselves 
to be possessed of no quality that made for success 
in their native land, were going out to the new 
country in the blind and cheerful hope that there 

[76] 



California 

some miracle would be performed that would 
transform their fortunes. There were husbands 
fleeing from drunken wives, sons fleeing from 
drunken fathers, drunkards fleeing from drink. 
There were the brutal and debased along with 
the decent and godly; and there were swarms of 
children, who, as it seemed, were only by a special 
Providence saved from falling each day by shoals 
into the water, and whose narrow escapes gave 
excitement to the monotonous voyage. On the 
whole they were a cheerful and very human com- 
pany. They sang glees and choruses and were 
moved to tears by the songs that recalled the old 
days in the old country; they played games, they 
danced solemn dances to tunes played by a fiddler 
who was one of their number; when they could 
they smoked and drank; and they grumbled at 
the food provided quite in the manner of their 
betters. There is something very charming in 
Stevenson's account of his fellow-passengers. The 
real modesty which was one of his essential quali- 
ties, and which existed quite naturally side by 
side with a frank and eager egoism, shows itself 
in a tone so free from the least sign of superiority 
or patronage, that it is quite evident he really did 
not consider himself a better fellow than the 
broken-down companions whose good-will he tried 
to gain by small services offered entirely in the 
spirit of comradeship. His indignation at the 
arrogance or condescension on the part of officials 
or saloon passengers is for them, and not for him- 

[77 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

self. With all of them he was on the friendliest 
terms, and he soon learnt a great deal concerning 
their histories and their prospects. 

His chief intimate on board was a Mr Jones, 
who was *' always hovering round inventions like 
a bee over a flower"; and to this man's stories 
of his amazing achievements, and the ill-luck that 
had prevented him from turning these to account, 
Stevenson listened, not only with patience but 
with real interest. 

On Sunday afternoon, August 18th, the Devonia 
reached New York. With a sudden and charac- 
teristic reaction from the cheerful economies of 
the voyage, Stevenson took his friend Jones to 
dine at one of the most expensive restaurants in 
the city; then spent the night in an Irish boarding- 
house, where he paid the sum of one shilling for 
his accommodation, and by five o'clock the next 
day was at the Ferry Depot, waiting to be taken 
across the river. He carried a small valise, a 
knapsack, and a railway rug, in which was be- 
stowed Bancroft's History of the United States in 
six fat volumes. There was a dense crowd of 
people, for four emigrant ships had come in since 
the previous Saturday night, and all the passen- 
gers were anxious to depart by the earliest possible 
train. Under the stress of such unusual numbers 
the ordinary arrangements completely broke down. 
Cold, wet and weary the emigrants stood in close 
ranks in a long shed, while officials shouted and 
fumed without making any impression upon the 

[78] 



California 

prevailing chaos. At last the crowd began to 
move, and, straining, pushing and gasping, passed 
on to the miserable boat that was to take them 
across the river. The rain came steadily down, 
and the heavily-laden, ill-ballasted boat was 
struck by strong gusts of wind that threatened 
its destruction. It reached the opposite bank in 
safety, however, and the emigrants, in whom 
long-continued misery and discomfort had obliter- 
ated all kindly human feeling, made a wild rush 
for the railway station. The distance was only 
about a hundred yards, yet Stevenson, exhausted 
by the struggle in which he had been forced to 
take part, was obliged twice to stop and sit down 
on his valise to rest. He was wet through when 
he reached the platform, and there for another 
hour he had to sit among the weary, dispirited 
crowd, too dazed with these accumulated miseries 
to note the doings of his companions. 

At length the cars were unlocked and the emi- 
grants crowded in. Then began that memorable 
journey of which Stevenson has told us in Across 
the Plains. Weak and utterly out of health as he 
was, it was a wonder that he survived its mani- 
fold discomforts; but his valiant spirit seemed to 
constrain his feeble body to endure manfully to 
the end. He fared scantily and coarsely; he 
shared his bed — made of boards placed from 
bench to bench of the car, and three straw cushions 
— with a Pennsylvanian Dutchman; he washed 
in a tin washing-dish on the platform of the car, 

[79] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

where he was all the time in the greatest danger of 
being jerked from his position by the movement of 
the train; he consorted with the squalid, the dirty, 
and the vulgar; he was treated by officials with 
the insolent toleration which is all that the emi- 
grant can expect; yet he kept a mind at liberty 
to observe the strange, beautiful or striking fea- 
tures of the country through which he passed, and 
to note gratefully the chance kindnesses and 
courtesies that met him. 

San Francisco was reached in the dark hours 
of the morning of August 30th. "The day was 
breaking as we crossed the ferry; the fog was 
rising over the citied hills of San Francisco; the 
bay was perfect — not a ripple, scarce a stain upon 
its blue expanse; everything was waiting breath- 
less for the sun. A spot of cloudy gold lit first 
upon the head of Tamalpais, and then widened 
downward on its shapely shoulder; the air seemed 
to awaken, and began to sparkle; and suddenly 

The tall hills Titan discovered, 

and the city of San Francisco, and the bay of 
gold and corn were lit from end to end with 
summer daylight." ^ 

Thus he reached the end of his journey, but 
with health entirely broken down. His first care 
was to seek news of Mrs Osbourne. He learnt 
that she was much better, and had found that it 
was possible, without giving undue pain to her 

^ Across the Plains. 

[80] 



California 

family, to obtain a divorce from her husband. 
There was therefore, at last, a prospect of mar- 
riage, and he must bestir himself to find the neces- 
sary money. The restoration of his own health 
was of the highest importance, and feeling that 
for the present it was useless for him to try to 
work, he resolved upon a novel 'cure.' He trav- 
elled along the coast a hundred and fifty miles 
to the south and camped out on a goat ranch on 
the range of mountains that lies about eighteen 
miles beyond Monterey. But his strength gave 
out, and for two nights he lay under a tree in a 
kind of stupor, and here the two ranchers — old 
bearhunters and soldiers — found him. They car- 
ried him to their hut and tended him, and he 
stayed with them for two weeks. As soon as he 
was well enough he went down to Monterey, the 
quaint little town which he has celebrated in his 
essay, "The Old Pacific Capital." This "old 
township lying among the sands" was "essentially 
and wholly Mexican," though almost all the land 
was owned by Americans and Americans held all 
the public offices. It had had its day of prosper- 
ity and had declined; and its former owners par- 
taking of its decay, formed a small society whose 
stately manners, picturesque customs and brightly- 
coloured costumes gave to the life of the town a 
touch of antique grace most healing to those who, 
like Robert Louis Stevenson, had been rasped by 
the contemplation of the crude new civilizations 
of the West. He lodged with a little French 

[81] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

doctor, and took one meal a day at a French 
restaurant, known as Simoneau's. Thus he added 
one more to his private collection of remembered 
inns and restaurants, not one of which, he says, 
can compare with this little inn at Monterey. 
Day after day he sat down to dinner in the little 
chill bare room, whose walls were adorned with 
rough oil sketches that reminded him of Barbizon. 
His fellow-guests were of many nationalities — 
Portuguese, French, Italian, Swiss, German, Chi- 
nese and Mexican. With all these Stevenson was 
soon on friendly terms, though he only sparingly 
allowed himself time for social intercourse and for 
rambles in the wood and along the shore. He 
was working hard and steadily. *'The Pavilion 
on the Links," a story that he had begun some 
time before, was finished and sent off to the pub- 
lisher in London. He began a novel called A 
Vendetta in the West, but half-way through this 
an attack of pleurisy stopped further efforts for 
the time. In December he returned to San Fran- 
cisco, searched the city for a cheap lodging, took 
a room in a poor house in Bush Street, and settled 
down to work once more. There was no 'Simo- 
neau's' here, and no delightful mixture of the 
dignified and the gay in the squalid company that 
he met when the hour for dinner came. For 
days together he spoke to no one except his land- 
lady and the waiters at the restaurant. Christ- 
mas passed in loneliness and with no relaxation of 
the rigorous way of life he had marked out for 

[82] 



California 

himself. He was ill, and suffering acutely, yet he 
never dreamt of giving in and appealing to his 
parents for help. He would battle this out by 
himself, and prove himself to be a man, or he 
would die in the attempt. Remittances from 
editors in England came in but slowly. Some im- 
portant letters, including one from his father enclos- 
ing twenty pounds, were delayed or miscarried. Yet 
he contrived to write cheerfully to his friends, and 
in the serio-comic account of his life that he sent 
to Colvin he did his best to hide what neverthe- 
less appears between the lines, his real suffering 
under those sordid conditions. Each morning, he 
wrote, a gentleman might be seen descending the 
steps of 608 Bush Street, and might be observed 
niaking his way to a neighbouring cheap restau- 
rant, there to take his breakfast of coffee, roll 
and butter — cost, fivepence. The gentleman, he 
added, had had some difficulty at first in bringing 
his roll to an end concurrently with his butter, 
but practice, and the impossibility of affording a 
second pat of the latter article, had made him 
expert, and now roll and butter expired at the 
same moment. Half an hour later the same gentle- 
man might be seen, "armed like George Washing- 
ton with his little hatchet," splitting kindling 
wood and breaking coal on the window-sill — 
choosing, so it was explained, this prominent 
position, not through a desire to exhibit his 
strength, his skill, or his industry, but simply 
because there was no other place in the room 

[83] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

where such exercise could be taken without danger 
of serious damage to the structure. Then for 
three or four hours the doughty performer is 
"engaged darkly with the ink-bottle." At mid- 
day he sallies forth again to dine, enjoys a "copi- 
ous meal" with half a bottle of wine, and coffee 
and brandy, for the sum of two and twopence. 
Then, until 4.30 "the being walks"; an hour's 
devotion to correspondence, or "the mysterious 
rites of the forenoon," follows, then another meal 
of coffee and roll and butter, an evening spent 
in reading and writing, until bedtime comes at 
eleven o'clock. 

From the loneliness of his dingy room in a mean 
street of a crowded city how far away must have 
appeared the happy comradeship of Fontainebleau, 
the brilliant, stimulating intercourse of the Savile 
Club, and even the companionable solitude of 
Swanston Cottage, "looking to the hills." It is 
true that even under these unfavourable condi- 
tions his genius for making friends did not entirely 
forsake him. Three chance acquaintances who 
became real friends he made in San Francisco — 
the artist, Virgil Williams, and his wife, and Charles 
Warren Stoddard. These gladly welcomed him 
to their homes whenever he could be induced to 
come; but his plan of life was so severe, and his 
industry so unremitting, that he would not allow 
himself more than an occasional visit. Mr Stod- 
dard rendered him an important service in another 
way. He lent him Herman Melville's books, 

[84 3 



California 

Typee, Omoo and South Sea Idylls, and these stories 
of strange and delightful lands opened out new 
realms to Stevenson and turned his thoughts 
toward those islands of the Pacific, one of which 
was, later, to be his home. 

Mrs Osbourne was now free, but no definite 
arrangement as to the date of her marriage with 
Stevenson had so far been made. As yet there 
were no signs of a reconciliation between him and 
his father, and things were going very badly with 
the self-exiled man. A letter to Charles Baxter, 
written toward the end of January 1880, an- 
nounces that the writer has had to drop from a 
fifty-cent to a twenty-five cent dinner, so that his 
daily food now costs him the sum of one shilling 
and tenpence halfpenny. Yet in February he 
wrote to W. E. Henley that he was '*well, cheer- 
ful and happy." He was working desperately to 
gain the money which meant to him independence 
and the vindication of his right as a man to choose 
his own path. The manuscripts that he sent 
home were accepted by the editors who received 
them, but the money came in slowly and Steven- 
son could not afford to wait. The long period of 
privation was rapidly breaking down his health. 
If he could only hang out a little longer, however, 
there was a prospect of some works more con- 
siderable than magazine articles being finished and 
of really substantial sums coming in. But in 
March his landlady's little daughter fell danger- 
ously ill, and Stevenson, forgetting his own cares, 

[85] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

devoted himself to nursing the child. This brought 
his long struggle to an end. For six weeks he 
lay so ill that it was, as he says, a 'toss-up' 
whether he would recover. But he won the toss, 
with the help of a kind and skilful doctor, and of 
his future wife who nursed him with entire devo- 
tion. Gradually the rapid consumption that 
threatened him retreated, and left him with only 
his normal amount of lung weakness, but worn 
out and attenuated so that it seemed scarcely 
possible that he could struggle back to health. 
Meanwhile, his father had heard of the straits to 
which he had been reduced, and of his terrible 
illness, and had at once telegraphed that he might 
in future count on an income of £250 annually. 
This was a tremendous relief and helped on Louis' 
convalescence wonderfully. 

On May 19th, 1880, while he was yet, as he 
afterward said, *'a mere complication of cough 
and bones," he was married to Mrs Osbourne. 
He had achieved the Great Adventure, through 
such trials and dangers, exile and peril of death, 
as surely entitled him to share the reward of the 
heroes of the old stories, and 'live happy ever 
after.' In a sense he did live happy ever after, 
for his wife brought him such happiness as he 
had never known before. But the tame and peace- 
ful life which is implied in the dear, conventional 
fairy tale ending was not for him. His thirst for 
adventure was unquenched; and the best proof 
that the wife he had chosen was his true and 

[86] 



California 

fitting helpmate is to be found in her willingness 
to go with him on those quests which led far 
away from the smooth highroad of everyday life. 
Immediately after the marriage she prepared to 
start with him upon a honeymoon as unconven- 
tional, surely, as any bride has ever been asked to 
contemplate. Stevenson has told the story of 
their adventures in his book The Silverado Squat- 
ters, and to home-abiding English people the whole 
reads like pure romance. The two, with Mrs 
Stevenson's young son, Lloyd Osbourne, crossed 
the Bay of San Francisco to South Vallejo, where 
they stayed for a few days looking for some retired 
and healthful spot where they might live a per- 
fectly quiet and simple life. Beyond valleys 
stretched bald, green pasture lands, rising to 
wooded hills, which were the outposts of one 
section of the Californian Coast Range. Between 
the hills green and well-watered valleys extended 
down to the sea, and it was along one of these 
— the Napa Valley — that the Stevensons pur- 
sued their investigations. One end of it was 
blocked by Mount Helena, the Mont Blanc of the 
range, and about three miles from this stood the 
newly-built village of Calistoga, with its one street 
of bright, clean, low houses. The whole neigh- 
bourhood of St Helena had once been alive with 
mining camps and villages, but now most of these 
were deserted; the houses stood dismantled and 
empty, the owners having departed and left them 
to their fate. It seemed to Stevenson that one 

[87] . 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

of these houses offered just what he and his wife 
were looking for, and by the advice of Kelma, the 
Cahstoga store-keeper and great man of the vil- 
lage, he decided to explore the Silverado settle- 
ment. It lay in a sheltered and beautiful position 
on the slope of Mount Helena; "there in the nick 
just where the eastern foothills joined the moun- 
tain, and she herself began to rise above the zone 
of forest — there was Silverado." To reach it 
he and his wife travelled two miles up the valley 
beyond Calistoga, then struck off to the right. 
The road mounted steeply; vineyards and deep 
meadows gave place to woods, where grew sturdy 
oaks and enormous pines. Near the shoulder of 
St Helena they left the road, took a trail to the 
left, and came soon to an open grassy space, 
planted sparsely like an orchard, with forest in- 
stead of fruit trees. But to their disappointment 
all the houses that had made up the Silverado 
settlement had been carted away, except one, 
which had formerly been the hotel, and was now 
occupied by a hunter whose name was Rufe 
Hanson. Mrs Hanson, however, when questioned, 
remembered that there were some houses remain- 
ing "at the tunnel," so the seekers pursued their 
way about a furlong along a road running through 
a forest and round the side of the hill, to a place 
where it suddenly widened and ended abruptly 
in a great canyon. The canyon was walled across 
by a 'dump' of rolling stones, from twenty to 
thirty feet high. Up this they mounted by lad- 

[88] 



California 

ders, then walked over a mass of loose stones, 
until they struck a triangular platform filling up 
the whole glen. Walls of bare red rock rose shut- 
ting it in on three sides. A line of rails, with 
trucks and other miners' stock, in front, and two 
shafts that had been sunk farther back ^showed 
that this had been the scene of the Silverado 
mining operations. But the object upon which 
the eyes of Stevenson and his wife fastened with 
the greatest eagerness was a small, brown, wooden 
house built upon one side of the platform, close 
up to the red wall of rock. It contained three 
rooms, each of which was entered from a different 
side and a different level. The window-frames 
had all been taken away, and sand had drifted in, 
blocking up the entrance; and in this soil chance 
seeds had produced a flourishing crop of vegeta- 
tion. The upper room, which, while the mine 
was working, had provided sleeping accommoda- 
tion for thirty miners, was fitted with a triple tier 
of beds, arranged like the berths in a ship. 

The Stevensons lost no time in making up their 
minds. This, they decided, should be their home 
for the summer. With some help from Rufe 
Hanson and his family the house was cleared and 
made habitable; some furniture and a stove were 
brought up from Calistoga, and the "Silverado 
Squatters" began their experiment. Stevenson 
and his wife shared the household duties between 
them. Each morning he rose early from his shelf - 
like bed and filled the kettle at a pool of clear 

[89] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

water that lay behind one of the shafts; then Ht 
a fire in the stove and prepared breakfast. After 
breakfast it was Mrs Stevenson's turn; and her 
husband went out into the sunlight to smoke his 
pipe, and gaze down into the beautiful little 
wooded dell below, with its fragrant trees of bay 
and nutmeg; and the little stream which, its 
head waters having been tapped by the shaft, 
had wandered long underground, but which farther 
on "came trotting out into the sunlight with a 
song." Sometimes for many days they saw no 
one but Mrs Hanson's brother, who came to split 
the huge logs that lay round about, to make fuel 
for their stove. Occasionally they walked down 
the hillside to visit the Toll House, the inn that 
lay in a glen below Silverado, and were present 
at the daily scene of excitement when the two 
Lakeport coaches, the one coming and the other 
going, woke up the drowsy little settlement for a 
brief space into shouting, bustling life. But, says 
Stevenson, "it appears to me looking back as 
though the far greater part of our life at Silverado 
had been passed propped upon an elbow or seated 
on a plank, listening to the silence that there is 
among the hills." ^ 

The summer, however, did not pass without 
disaster. Mrs Stevenson and her son both caught 
diphtheria. An illness in the miners' house at 
Silverado was a terrible experience, and although 
happily both patients recovered, it was felt that the 

1 The Silverado Squatters. 

[90] 



California 

charm of the place had departed. About the middle 
of July the party left Silverado, and made their way 
to New York, homeward bound for England. 

Nothing now remained of the late misunder- 
standing between Stevenson and his father. A 
deep and peculiarly beautiful affection existed 
between these two who had each done so much 
to wound and sadden the other. From this time 
forward their relations took on a tenderness un- 
usual between grown men, and especially touching 
in view of the stern and rugged character of the 
elder Stevenson. For his son's sake he was now 
willing and anxious to receive the wife of whom 
he had heard little that was agreeable to his strict 
Scottish notions, and the way for the return of 
the exile was made as smooth as his affectionate 
words and freely given money could make it. 
On August 7th, 1880, just a year since Stevenson 
had left Scotland, the party sailed from New York. 
They were met at Liverpool by Thomas Steven- 
son, his wife, and Colvin, and the party travelled 
on together to Edinburgh. It did not take the 
younger Mrs Stevenson long to establish her posi- 
tion with her new relatives. Her husband's father 
in particular was strongly attracted to her, and soon 
learned to regard the marriage as the best thing that 
could possibly have happened to Louis. The only 
trouble that remained was the state of his health. 
He had by no means recovered from the effects of 
his late privations and serious illness, and must, at 
any rate for a time, be regarded as an invalid. 

[91] 



CHAPTER VI: In Search of 
Health 

EDINBURGH, as Stevenson admits, "pays 
cruelly for her high seat in one of the 
vilest climates under heaven. She is lia- 
ble to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, 
to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea 
fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow 
as it comes flying southward from the Highland 
hills." 1 

Only sound lungs can endure in a climate such 
as this; and a very few weeks proved that, for 
Stevenson, a winter in Edinburgh would be disas- 
trous. Doctors were consulted, who spoke seri- 
ously of his condition, and strongly advised him 
to try what the air of the High Alps would do for 
him. Accordingly, about the middle of October 
Mr and Mrs Stevenson, with Lloyd Osbourne, set 
out for Davos Platz. There was a fourth member 
of the party also, who, as he became Stevenson's 
almost constant companion during the next three 
years, must now be introduced. This was "a 
little, very alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye terrier, 
as black as a hat, with a wet bramble for a nose 
and two cairngorms for eyes." He was a gift from 
Sir Walter Simpson, and had at first been called 
' Walter,' in honour of the donor, but his name had 
been subjected to a series of corruptions, and it 
was as 'Woggs' that he travelled to Davos Platz. 

^ Picturesque Notes on Edinburgh, 

[92] 



In Search of Health 

The party arrived on November 4th and estab- 
Hshed themselves at the Hotel Belvedere. Davos, 
as a health resort, was at that time only in the 
first stages of its development, and there were 
comparatively few visitors. Yet Stevenson did 
not find in this Swiss valley the sense of freedom 
and solitude that was essential to him. He com- 
plained that the valley was so shut in by moun- 
tains that no glimpse of open country was possible, 
and the dwellers were forced "to live in holes and 
corners" and could ''change only one for another." 
On the confined, monotonous walks that alone 
were possible you saw houses all the way, dotted 
to right and to left. You could not get away into 
happy solitude; there was always "some one in 
front whom you were visibly overtaking," or 
"some one behind who was audibly overtaking 
you"; while a score or so passed going in the 
opposite direction. But the life had its good 
points. There were beautiful, still dawns, when 
the clouds lay low and grey over a world so 
thickly covered with its carpet of snow that no 
sound was heard, and men passed, and heavy 
waggons rolled along, like dream figures before 
the eyes of sleep. There were solemn starlight 
nights and clear bright noons; and there were 
breathless moments when, having with pains 
dragged one's toboggan up the long slope, one 
sped like the wind down those strange, white 
mountains into the vale where the lights glittered 
below — moments such as teach " the pulse an 

[9S] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

unaccustomed tune" and add "a new excitement 
to the life of man upon his planet." 

For society, the members of the little party 
were mainly and happily dependent on each other. 
Stevenson delighted to join in the occupations of 
his young stepson, and Woggs, the pugnacious, 
might confidently be depended upon to provide 
some small excitement daily. One very congenial 
friend they had found waiting for them when they 
reached Davos — John Addington Symonds, who, 
like Stevenson, had come to seek for health in 
the High Alps, and to whom Mr Edmund Gosse 
had given them a letter of introduction. The 
delight of finding some one with whom he could 
hold the long intimate discussions that he loved 
gave Davos, for Stevenson, something of the charm 
of Barbizon. 

The winter passed without an attack of illness, 
but no considerable improvement took place in 
the general state of Stevenson's health. The 
doctors w^ere confident, however, that the climate 
of Davos would ultimately have favourable effects, 
and it was with the prospect of returning in the 
following winter that, at the end of April, he and 
his wife left the Alpine valley. Lloyd Osbourne 
had, before this, been sent to school in England, 
so they had only Woggs for their companion upon 
the homeward journey. They made a short stay 
at Barbizon and another at Paris, and at the end 
of May reached Edinburgh. 

June and July were spent with Mrs Thomas 

[94] 



In Search of Health 

Stevenson at Pitlochry, in a small house near a 
"wonderful burn." Here work was seriously taken 
up again. Travel and general articles were for a 
time put aside, and a volume of tales dealing with 
the supernatural was projected. Three of these 
tales, "Thrawn Janet," "The Merry Men," and 
"The Body Snatcher," were written during the 
stay at Pitlochry. At the beginning of August 
the party — now increased by the presence of 
Lloyd Osbourne, home for the holidays — moved 
to Braemar, where they lived in a cottage "late 
the late Miss McGregor's." At Braemar Steven- 
son began Treasure Island; and his own delightful 
account of the manner of its inception must be 
given. "There wa." a schoolboy in the late Miss 
McGregor's cottage, home from the holidays. . . . 
He had no thought of literature; it was the art of 
Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages; and 
with the aid of pen and ink, and a shilling box 
of water-colours, he had soon turned one of the 
rooms into a picture gallery. My more immediate 
duty towards the gallery was to be showman; but 
I would sometimes unbend a little, join the artist 
(so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon 
with him in a generous emulation, making coloured 
drawings. On one of these occasions I made the 
map of an island; it was elaborately, and (I 
thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it 
took my fancy beyond expression; it contained 
harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with 
the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed 

[95] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

my performance 'Treasure Island.' . . . No child 
but must remember laying his head in the grass, 
staring into the infinitesimal forest, and seeing it 
grow populous with fairy armies. Somewhat in 
this way, as I paused upon my map of Treasure 
Island, the future characters of the book began to 
appear there visibly among imaginary woods, and 
their brown faces and bright weapons peeped 
out upon me, from unexpected quarters, as they 
passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure 
on those few square inches of a flat projection. 
The next thing I knew I had some papers before 
me, and was writing out a list of chapters. . . . 
On a chill September morning, by the cheek of 
a brisk fire and the rain drumming on the window, 
I began The Sea Cook, for that was the original 
title. I have begun (and finished) a number of 
other books, but I cannot remember to have sat 
down to one of them with more complacency." ^ 
The whole party took a delighted interest in 
the new story, and were eager to have a hand in 
its making. There were to be no women char- 
acters: *' Lloyd's orders," said Stevenson, "and 
who so blithe to obey." Mr Thomas Stevenson, 
who had joined them for a week or two, was as 
keen as the schoolboy in urging the writer on and 
supplying details and suggestions. The list of 
the contents of Billy Bones' chest was his; he 
spent a whole morning making it out on the back 
of a legal envelope; and it was at his especial 

* The Art of Writing. 

[96] 



In Search of Health 

request that the treasure-seeking ship was called 
the Walrus. Dr Alexander Hay Japp, a new 
acquaintance then visiting at the cottage, was 
almost equally interested, and lamented that he 
was obliged to leave while the story was still in 
its early stages. His place was taken by Mr 
Edmund Gosse, who caught fire at once when the 
pages already written were read to him; and 
under the stimulus of such general excitement and 
appreciation the story went merrily on at the rate 
of a chapter a day. 

Before September was ended, and when the 
nineteenth chapter had been reached, there came 
a change in the weather. Cold winds and rain 
obliged Stevenson to leave hurriedly for the South. 
He visited London, had an interview with Dr 
Clark, and October 18th saw him and his wife 
again established at Davos. Treasure Island had, 
in the meantime, been accepted, on the recom- 
mendation of Dr Japp, by the proprietor of 
Young Folks, and had begun its course as a serial. 
It was necessary, therefore, to finish the story as 
soon as possible. Stevenson's health had so far 
improved since the previous winter that he was 
able to sit down regularly to a steady spell of 
work. In order that he might not be subjected 
to the interruptions of hotel life, a chalet was 
taken, a servant hired, and the little household 
arranged in every way to suit his convenience. 
In these very different surroundings the work 
that had been so suddenly dropped at Brae- 

[97] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

mar was resumed. Happily the inspiration held. 
Fourteen more chapters were written in a fort- 
night, and the book was finished with the same 
spirit and ease that had attended its beginning. 
After a short spell of idleness, Stevenson started 
on The Silverado Squatters, and before he left 
Davos in April he had finished this, as well as 
written five articles for various magazines. Still 
he was not altogether satisfied with what he had 
accomplished. His ambition of keeping his family 
without help from his father was still far from 
being attained. Treasure Island had attracted 
but little notice, and there was, so far, no sug- 
gestion that it should be revived in book form. 
His papers in the Cornhill had proved very popu- 
lar, but had not been generally recognized as 
anything above the ordinary run of magazine 
articles. He was disappointed, though not dis- 
couraged; and the inspiration that had carried 
him on so happily began to flag. The summer 
was spent mainly in the Highlands, where the 
family was joined by Colvin, and where The 
Treasure of Franchard was begun. But the 
weather was wet and dreary, and again in Sep- 
tember Stevenson was forced to make a hurried 
flight southward, this time not before a haemor- 
rhage had put the whole party in a state of alarm. 
He went to London, saw Dr Clark, and was 
delighted to receive from him a confirmation of 
the opinion given by the doctor at Davos in the 
previous April that a return to the High Alps for 

[98] 



In Search of Health 

the coming winter was not a necessity. The 
climate of Davos had never agreed with Mrs 
Stevenson, and as her health, too, had now broken 
down, the permission to pass the winter months 
in France was especially welcome. About the 
middle of September Louis, with his favourite 
cousin, *Bob,' set out for France, in search of a 
suitable resting place. They passed through Paris, 
tried Montpellier without result, and his compan- 
ion being then obliged to return, Louis went on 
alone to Marseilles. Here his wife joined him, 
and together they decided upon a lovely country 
house at St Marcel, about five miles from Mar- 
seilles. But the choice was most unfortunate. 
For some reason that did not appear the house 
had a most disastrous effect on Stevenson's health, 
and from October to Christmas he had constant 
attacks of illness and was only capable of very 
short and intermittent spells of work. Then, as 
a crowning disaster, a fever broke out in St Mar- 
cel. Mrs Stevenson in her letters described most 
vividly the distressing incidents of this epidemic. 
Her one endeavour was to shield her husband, 
and it was hastily arranged that he should pro- 
ceed to Nice, leaving her to wind up their affairs 
at St Marcel and follow him later. There ensued 
a series of mischances that resulted in nearly a 
week of distressing suspense for Mrs Stevenson. 
The letters and telegrams sent to her from Nice 
all miscarried. She waited in a fever of anxiety 
for four days, then went to Marseilles and tele- 

[99] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

graphed to every place she could think of whence 
news might possibly be obtained. "The people 
at Marseilles were very kind," she wrote to Mr 
Symonds, ''and advised me to take no further 
steps to find my husband. He was certainly 
dead, they said. It was plain that he stopped at 
some little station on the road, speechless and 
dying, and it was now too late to do anything; 
I had much better return at once to my friends. 
*Eet of en appens so,' said the Secretary, and 'Oh 
yes, all right, very well,' added a Swiss in a sym- 
pathetic voice." ^ Two days more passed, and 
then Mrs Stevenson took the train to Nice, mak- 
ing inquiries at every station on her way. She 
found her husband safe and well, and reading the 
first letter of the many she had written to him as 
she knocked at the door. 

From Nice they went on to Marseilles, and then 
to Hyeres, and here at last they found the ideal 
home of which they had been in search. "This 
spot, our garden and our view are sub-celestial," 
Stevenson wrote to his friends at home. "I sing 
daily with Bunyan, that great bard, 'I dwell 
already the next door to Heaven.'"^ 

During the nine months that he spent at his 
'Chalet La Solitude,' as the house was named, 
his health steadily improved, and his literary 
prospects brightened. At the beginning of May 
he wrote in the highest spirits to his father and 
mother to tell them that he had received from 

^ The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 2 ll)id, 

C 100 ] 



In Search of Health 

Messrs Cassell an offer for the book rights of 
Treasure Island, for "... A hundred pounds, all 
alive, O! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden- 
minted quid. ... It does look as if I should 
support myself without trouble in the future. If 
I have only health, I can, I thank God. It is 
dreadful to be a great big man, and not be able 
to buy bread." 

The thought that his great ambition was in a 
fair way to be realized spurred him on to fresh 
exertions. The Silverado Squatters was finished 
and sent off to a publisher in America. A collec- 
tion of poems for children that had been begun at 
Braemar was added to until the book was nearly 
complete. Then Prince Otto, begun in the sad 
San Francisco days, was taken in hand. Ten 
days later Stevenson was, as he said, *'up to the 
waist in it," and it was only by valiant and steady 
efforts that he finally drew himself triumphantly 
free. In all his undertakings his wife was his 
constant helper and sympathizer. ''I love her 
better than ever, and admire her more," he wrote 
to his mother in one of his rare expansive mo- 
ments, "and I cannot think what I have done to 
deserve so good a gift." His young stepson was 
also a source of great delight to him. The boy 
in Stevenson never died, though in the ordinary 
business of life he made way for the more seriously 
disposed man; but he was never far away, and in 
moments of relaxation he stepped naturally to 
the front place, with the entire and unblushing 

[101] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

approval of the elder partner. For all his youth 
and his wildness, this 'eternal boy' sometimes 
did good service; it was he who gave Stevenson 
his first popular success, for it was he who wrote 
Treasure Island. The book appeared in Novem- 
ber 1883, and the stories of statesmen and critics 
who sat up till the small hours of the morning to 
read it recall the triumphant days of the Waverley 
Novels. Scott himself never wrote anything more 
full of the robust spirit of adventure than this 
book, the work of a consumptive patient who could 
not brave a shower, and must flee for his life before 
a fog. 

One great sorrow clouded the latter part of this 
year. In September came the news of the death 
of Walter Ferrier, one of Stevenson's oldest 
friends. The strange and sad career of this bril- 
liant, gifted young Scotsman is sketched in the 
essay *'01d Mortality," and this, with the letter 
to W. E. Henley, written soon after the news 
came, shows how deep was Stevenson's grief at this 
first breach in the inner circle of his friends. 

He looked eagerly for comfort to the promised 
visit of W. E. Henley and Charles Baxter. They 
came in January; but after a. week spent at 'La 
Solitude' it was found that this earthly paradise 
was too small to accommodate the whole party 
in comfort. Stevenson therefore proposed that 
they should all go and take a holiday together in 
some other place. They went to Nice, and there 
he caught a cold which brought on congestion of 

[102] 




PORTRAIT OF STEVEXSOX AT VAILIMA 



In Search of Health 

the lungs. The doctors agreed that there was 
no hope, and advised Mrs Stevenson to send for 
some member of the family to be with her at the 
end. She sent for Bob Stevenson, and he encour- 
aged her, even in these desperate circumstances, 
to hope. Together they nursed Louis, and once 
more the stubborn Scottish constitution triumphed. 
Inch by inch the enemy was driven back, though 
it could not be entirely conquered. Time after 
time during the next few months a similar battle 
had to be fought, and once at least defeat was very 
near. In the first week in May, after the Steven- 
sons had returned to 'La Solitude,' came a most 
terrible attack of haemorrhage. Being unable to 
speak, Stevenson made signs to his wife for a 
paper and pencil, and wrote: "Don't be frightened; 
if this is death, it is an easy one." Mrs Steven- 
son's hand shook as she tried to pour out for her 
husband the medicine that he required; he took 
the bottle from her, and with a steady hand 
measured out the dose. 

Through the anxious days that followed, his 
on-e thought was for his wife, as hers was for him. 
He bore the accumulation of ills that fell upon 
him with a cheery patience that helped her, frail 
as she was, to bear up under the heavy toil of 
nursing and attendance; and she lightened, by 
every device that love-directed ingenuity could 
suggest, the tedium of the sick-room. The pa- 
tient was forbidden to speak for fear of bringing 
a return of the haemorrhage, and for the same 

[103] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

reason his right arm was worn in a sling; he suf- 
fered acutest pain from sciatica; and, finally, an 
attack of Egyptian ophthalmia condemned him 
to the almost complete inaction of a darkened 
room. His wife sat by him, and invented for his 
amusement some of the marvellous and laughably- 
serious stories that appeared later in The Dyna- 
miter. He wrote her cheerful little notes, treat- 
ing, after his fashion, the effort of forming letters 
with his left hand in the gloom of his darkened 
room as a delightful new adventure; and he 
actually wrote, in the same way, some more 
verses for his projected Child's Garden. In the 
face of such a cheerful ignoring of his claims to 
make his victim miserable and helpless, it is small 
wonder that the enemy at last retreated in disgust; 
and before the end of May Louis was pronounced 
convalescent. "The doctor says," wrote Mrs 
Stevenson to the anxious parents in Edinburgh, 
** ' Keep him alive until he is forty, and then — 
although a winged bird, he may live to ninety.' 
But between now and forty he must live as though 
he were walking on eggs, and for the next two 
years, no matter how he feels, he must live the 
life of an invalid." ^ 

At the beginning of June the party left Hyeres, 
and after a short stay at Royat, travelled by easy 
stages to England, where they arrived on July 
1st, 1884. It was now nearly four years since 
Stevenson's return from California, and the whole 

* Graham Balfour's Life. 

[104] 



In Search of Health 

of that time had been spent in a diligent search 
after health. Yet in 1884 his condition was little 
better than it had been in 1880, and the prospect 
was darker in so far as all hope of a moderately 
speedy recovery had been given up. For some 
years at least he was condemned to live the life 
of an invalid, and the question now arose as to 
where those years should be passed. Stevenson's 
strongest wish in the matter was that he might 
be near his father, who was now perceptibly 
failing. One by one the various activities con- 
nected with the business in which Thomas Steven- 
son had delighted were given up, and as his outside 
interests thus fell away, he drew closer to the 
members of his small home circle, and especially 
to his well-loved son. The caressing tenderness 
of his manner toward Louis touched deeply all 
those who saw the two together. ''It was," says 
Mrs Stevenson, ''just like a mother with a young 
child." That these two, who loved each other so 
dearly, and whose lives both hung by such a 
slender thread, might not be entirely cut off from 
opportunities of meeting, seemed a thing for which 
some risks might well be run; and since two doc- 
tors out of four who were consulted were of the 
opinion that Stevenson might live at Bourne- 
mouth with tolerable safety, at Bournemouth he 
decided to remain. Both he and his wife were 
delighted at the prospect that this plan opened 
up. Compared with the life they had been forced 
to live since their marriage, a home within a few 

[105] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

hours' journey of London, and with Edinburgh 
and Paris at by no means impossible distances, 
seemed to them a very modified and bearable form 
of exile. 

The first winter was spent partly at an hotel, 
and partly in private lodgings; and though Steven- 
son was rarely able to leave the house, he had 
no serious attack of illness, and managed to do a 
very fair amount of work. Mr Henley spent two 
months at Bournemouth, and the two, whose 
Deacon Brodie had been produced that summer 
and had met with some success, worked together 
at two more plays. Beau Austin and Admiral 
Guinea, which they hoped would bring them the 
rich reward that falls to the successful playwright. 
Stevenson also, in response to a request from the 
editor of the Pall Mall Gazette for a Christmas 
story, furbished up the weird and horrible tale 
"The Body Snatcher," written two years before 
at Pitlochry. 

Such a record was cheering in the highest degree 
to those who were watching with anxious tremors 
the effect of this experiment of a winter in Eng- 
land. It seemed to justify the provision of a 
permanent home in Bournemouth for Stevenson 
and his wife; and at the end of January 1885 
Thomas Stevenson bought a comfortable, modern, 
ivy-covered house, with about an acre of ground, 
and presented it to his daughter-in-law. It was 
named ' Skerry vore,' in memory of one of the 
family's greatest achievements in lighthouse build- 

[106] 



In Search of Health 

ing. A tiny stream ran at the bottom of the 
garden, a bank of heather bordered the lawn, 
and there were glorious clumps of rhododendrons 
growing in a small chine above the stream. At 
* Skerry vore' Stevenson and his wife lived for the 
greater part of the next four years. In the sum- 
mer and autumn he usually managed to pay some 
visits to London; once he went with his father 
to Matlock, and with his wife he visited Cam- 
bridg;e, Dartmoor, and Paris. But these journeys 
nearly always brought an attack of illness which 
meant weeks of confinement to a sick-room. In 
winter he scarcely went out at all. '* Remember 
the pallid brute who lived in * Skerry vore' like a 
weevil in a biscuit," he wrote years later from 
Vailima to his friend Colvin; but there is little 
justification for the comparison unless one can 
imagine it to be characteristic of a weevil to live 
a life intense as secluded, and to force his narrow 
surroundings to yield to him that which sufficed 
to fill his days with variety and interest. Steven- 
son made new friends, though his opportunities 
for social intercourse were few, since he was forced 
to spend weeks together in bed, and forbidden to 
speak above a whisper. Moreover, if he was in 
his normal state of health, no visiter — it mattered 
not from what distance — who was suffering from 
a cold could be admitted to * Skerry vore,' for fear 
of infection. So that it is a proof of that genius 
for friendship which has already been spoken of 
that he became really intimate, not only with 

[107] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

Dr Scot, who attended him, but also with his 
neighbours, Sir Henry and Lady Taylor and their 
daughter. Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, and Miss 
Boodle. He could no longer roam about the 
streets as he had been used to do "scraping ac- 
quaintance with all classes of man- and woman- 
kind," but this only meant that he got the more 
out of those few possible acquaintances of a class 
different from his own who came in his way — 
servants, tradespeople, the barber who came to 
cut his hair, and the veterinary surgeon who 
attended the death-bed of poor Woggs — who had 
by this time undergone a further transformation 
and become 'Boguey.' Boguey died from wounds 
received in battle, and his master and mistress 
mourned him so deeply that they never could 
bring themselves to put another dog in his vacant 
place. 

But work was Stevenson's greatest resource and 
greatest pleasure. He completed his Child's Gar- 
den of Verses, and this was published in March 
1885. In April the first instalment of Prince 
Otto was published, and in May appeared More 
New Arabian Nights. In the later part of the 
same year there came to him the curious experi- 
ence that led to the production of The Strange 
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He had, he tells 
us, been seeking for a long time "to find a body, 
a vehicle, for that strong sense of man's double 
being which must at times come in upon and over- 
whelm the mind of every thinking creature." 

[108] 



In Search of Health 

He had tried various forms — The Travelling Com- 
panion, which was rejected by the editor to whom 
it was sent, and which he afterward burnt, and 
MarkheiiUf sl psychological study which was pub- 
lished later. But neither of these gave a satis- 
factory shape to the idea that was in his mind, 
and he still went seeking some fresh inspiration. 
At length, when for two days his thoughts had 
been given almost exclusively to this subject, help 
came to him in his sleep. He has told us how 
from his earliest years he was a persistent dreamer. 
In his childhood his dreams were the ordinary 
vague and terrifying experiences that come to 
nervous and sensitive natures; but as he grew 
older, the confused sights and sounds resolved 
themselves into definite scenes and more or less 
connected stories; and the stories grew clearer 
and clearer, until at last enough remained of them 
in the dreamer's mind when he woke in the morn- 
ing to enable him to sit down at his desk and 
write out what the Little People, or Brownies, as 
he called them, had told him in the night. It was 
to the Brownies that he owed the inspiration of 
Dr Jehyll and Mr Hyde. He saw in his sleep, he 
tells us, two of the most important scenes in his 
story, and when he woke, although he was still 
very weak from a recent attack of haemorrhage, 
he sat down and wrote, from the suggestion thus 
given, the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. 
When it was finished it was submitted to his wife, 
who was his constant and most trusted critic. 

C 109 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

She found in it one fundamental fault — it was 
really an allegory, but was treated as if it were 
merely a story. Stevenson was, at this time, 
forbidden to speak, so, according to the custom 
established for such circumstances, the criticism 
was written out and left for him to read. After 
a short interval his bell rang. His wife went to 
him and found him sitting up in bed and point- 
ing to a heap of ashes, which was all that re- 
mained of Br Jehjll and Mr Hyde. He had seen 
the justice of the criticism, had realized that the 
new attempt must have in it nothing of the old, 
and had taken the best means to ensure this 
result. He set to work again, and wrote with al- 
most feverish energy during three days; and in- 
stead of being exhausted by this tremendous 
effort, he seemed to feel the excitement as a tonic. 
The next month or six weeks was spent in polish- 
ing the story, and it was issued — in paper covers 
at the price of one shilling — by Messrs Long- 
mans. At first it threatened to fall flat; then a 
review in the Times drew public attention to it, 
and it suddenly became the rage. In the next 
six months forty thousand copies were sold in 
England; and the American edition was almost 
equally successful. 

Another story furnished by the Brownies was 
"Olalla," which appeared in the Christmas num- 
ber of the Court and Society Revieiv. This, how- 
ever, was not so successful, and Stevenson himself 
criticized it severely. In the previous March he 

[110] 



In Search of Health 

had began a stoiy for boys, laying the scene in 
the district he t.new so well — the country near 
Edinburgh, whei-e the manse of Colinton stood. 
The story had been taken up without any very 
serious intent, fmd as lightly discarded after a few 
chapters had been written. But, in January 1886, 
after Dr JekyU and Mr Hyde had been fairly 
launched, Stevenson's thoughts went back to this 
fragment. ^Phe story was resumed, and flowed 
wdth such ^jurprising ease that it almost seemed to 
write itself. "In one of my books, and in one 
only," savg Stevenson, "the characters took the 
bit in their teeth; all at once they became de- 
tached from the flat paper, they turned their 
backs on me and walked off bodily; and from that 
time my task was stenographic — it was they who 
spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of 
the story." ^ This was at the beginning; but 
before the rough outline of the story as it existed 
in Stevenson's mind was more than half filled in 
the inspiration flagged, and when Mr Colvin sug- 
gested that the return of the hero to Edinburgh 
would give an opportunity of bringing the story 
to a close he gladly agreed. In this unfinished 
condition, the story, which he called Kidnapped, 
was accepted by the editor of Young Folks, and 
ran in that magazine from May to July. 

But there were many hours and days during 
this period of his life when, by the doctor's orders, 
or by sheer physical inability which even his 

^ The Art of Writing. 

[Ill] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

resolution could not overcome, i^o work could be 
attempted. Yet even each of these was forced 
to yield something as it passed Music was a 
great resource. His old taste for it revived, and 

' when he was well enough to be up he would sit 
for hours at the piano trying to pick out the 
melodies that ran so joyously in bis head. He 
never learned to play even passably well, and his 
efforts at composition were still less successful; 
but he was not one of those men who can find 
enjoyment only where they excel. Hif^ pleasure 
came from the effort, from the sense of tl'^^ stirring 
of new faculties, bodily or mental. Whe'/^ ^^ was 

' too ill even for music, and was forced to liv^ silent 
in his bed, he amused himself by modelling^ small 
figures of wax or clay, and to this employ i-*^^^^ 
also he brought the keenest possible zest. ^ 

Stevenson took, moreover, a keen interest "^ ^^ 
public affairs, though, after the incident of tF^^ 
withdrawal of troops from the Soudan in 1884 he 
had, as he says, *'died to politics." If an oppor- 
tunity came for him to do anything, he would, 
he said, do it; until that hour came he would not 
vex his soul. Twice while he was living at 
Bournemouth he believed that the hour had come. 
The first occasion was upon the fall of Khartoum 
and the death of Gordon, when he contemplated 
an attempt to call Mr Gladstone to account and 
to stir the national conscience by public denuncia- 
tion of those who had left so many brave soldiers 
to a cruel death. But he hesitated and the time 

[112] 



In Search of Health 

passed, and though it is unlikely that anything 
he could have done would have proved effective, 
he always bitterly regretted his inaction. The 
second occasion arose out of the affairs of Ireland. 
Toward the end of 1885 a farmer of Kerry was 
shot by a party of moonlighters, and his family, 
who had fought bravely in defence of their father 
and had killed one of his murderers, were after- 
ward subjected to a cruel and rigorous boycott. 
Stevenson read the details of the case with horri- 
fied indignation. It seemed to him terrible that 
the people of England should sit still and make no 
sign while brave and innocent men and women all 
over the sister country were at the mercy of those 
who could so deal with their fellow-creatures. 
When the boycott had gone on until the spring 
of 1887 he decided that he himself as an honest 
man and one who hated oppression was called 
upon to do something to help those who were 
suffering. Pie formed in all seriousness a plan 
which seemed to his friends, and even to his wife, 
quixotic and absurd, but which he regarded simply 
as the fulfilment of a plain duty. He proposed 
to take the condemned farm, and go with his wife 
and stepson to live there. His friends pointed 
out that this would do no good to those he wished 
to benefit — might possibly do them harm; but 
he was not to be turned from his purpose. To 
him the question was not one of expediency or 
even of benevolence. Should judgment go by 
default for Might against Right? Should not the 

[113] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

brave, eternal principle of clean justice between 
man and man be upheld in spite of politics? — 
it was thus that the case presented itself to him. 
Mrs Stevenson, respecting, though not sympa- 
thizing with, her husband's convictions, was ready 
to go with him and to do her part cheerfully; and 
it was only his father's rapidly increasing illness 
that caused the plan to be abandoned. ''To the 
last," says Sir Sidney Colvin, "he was never well 
satisfied that he had done right in giving way." 

On May 8th, 1887, Thomas Stevenson died. 
Since the previous autumn he had been living at 
Bournemouth in order to be near his son, but 
during April he grew so ill that it was thought 
advisable to take him to his home in Edinburgh. 
The change brought no improvement, and Louis 
was hurriedly sent for, but arrived too late to be 
recognized by his father. 

The loss was to him a terrible one, and in his 
weak physical state he found it hard to fight 
against the depression that settled heavily upon 
him. The bleak winds of an Edinburgh spring 
brought him a fresh cold, and on the day of his 
father's funeral he was too ill to leave the house. 
For nearly three weeks this illness kept him in 
Edinburgh, and when he at length returned to 
Bournemouth, it was only to be attacked by 
another haemorrhage, followed by a tedious con- 
valescence. Before he left his sick-room he had 
made arrangements for bringing his stay at 
Bournemouth to a close. The three years' con- 

[114] 



In Search of Health 

tinual battle against ill-health had worn him out, 
bravely as he had faced the enemy. His doctors 
strongly advised a change, and there was nothing 
now to keep him in England, since his mother was 
willing to go with him wherever he elected to 
settle. He determined, therefore, to see if, the 
world lying before him, he could not find some 
place where he might live the ordinary life of a 
normal man, and be done with invalidism. After 
consideration it was resolved that America, as 
being Mrs Stevenson's home, and already in part 
familiar to them, should first be tried. By the 
middle of July ' Skerry vore' was let, and passages 
taken for Stevenson, his wife, mother, stepson, and 
their attached and capable maid, Valentine Roch, 
for New York. 



[115] 



CHAPTER VII: America and 
the South Seas 

ON August 20th, 1887, Stevenson left 
Bournemouth for London, spent a day 
at Armfield's Hotel, where a succession of 
his friends visited him to say good-bye, and on the 
next day embarked with his party on board the 
Ludgate Hill, The ship was no luxurious liner, 
but a 'tramp,' carrying a consignment of horses 
and apes. Of these fellow-passengers the Steven- 
sons had known nothing, but the discovery that 
the Ludgate Hill was to put in at Havre for her 
live cargo was not allowed to spoil either their 
tempers or their enjoyment of the voyage. "We 
agree," wrote Stevenson's mother in her journal, 
"to look upon it as an adventure, and make the 
best of it." The weather was very bad, and off 
Newfoundland Stevenson caught cold and was for 
a few days really ill. Yet he declared that 
throughout the voyage he was so happy his heart 
literally sang. He was a true son of his father 
and his grandfather in that he had always loved 
the sea and delighted in the free, hardy life on 
board ship, and his recent escape from the dreary 
life of the sick-room made everything bright before 
him. 

The voyage came to an end, and for the second 
time Stevenson landed at New York, — not as 
before, a poor 'amateur emigrant,' a mere unit 
in a mass of people who were treated with scant 

[116] 



America and the South Seas 

courtesy, and driven whithersoever the officials 
would have them go. He was now a celebrity — 
"Quite the famous party, in fact," as he wrote 
to Colvin — for whom a crowd of newspaper 
reporters anxiously waited, and who was the chief 
object of attention to the people who stood about 
the landing-stage and stared curiously at *'the 
man who wrote Dr JeJcyll and Mr HydeJ^ One 
wonders what the keen-eyed American citizens 
thought of this carelessly dressed man, with his 
tall, attenuated figure, his thin, brown face, his 
eager, quickly glancing eyes, his long hair — now 
turned dark brown — his lithe, graceful move- 
ments and quick, significant gestures. They had 
little more than a passing glimpse of all these 
things, for Mr W. H. Low, a friend of the old 
Paris and Barbizon days, was waiting for Steven- 
son at the landing-stage, and at once carried him 
off. He stayed for a fortnight — which he spent 
in bed — at his friend's house in Newport, and for 
another fortnight at New York, where he was 
introduced to a few of Mr Low's friends, men 
famous in literature or in art. It was necessary 
for him to leave New York before the winter set 
in, and he was advised to try a sanatorium for 
consumptive patients that had lately been estab- 
lished near the shores of the Saranac lake, among 
the Adirondack mountains. Accordingly he and 
his family set out for Saranac early in October. 
They took a small verandahed cottage known as 
'Baker's,' which Stevenson called "a wind-belea- 

[117] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

guered, hill-top, hat-box." The surrounding coun- 
try he loved, because it reminded him of the High- 
lands. There was a stream of running water 
within sight of the house that brought to mind 
the burn of Pitlochry, and a "Perthshire hill" 
rose upon one side. On the other were to be seen 
some of the scattered houses of the village. The 
cost of living at Saranac was high, and the condi- 
tions not too comfortable. Throughout the winter 
the cold was intense, and the stoves that were 
kept lighted all over the house seemed to do little 
toward producing any sensation of warmth. 
Stevenson's wife and mother, as well as Valen- 
tine Roch, suffered very severely from colds and 
influenza, but he himself remained unaffected by 
the severe weather, and was able to work steadily. 
It was while he was pacing up and down the 
verandah of the Saranac cottage, one dark, clear 
night, with the thermometer below zero, that the 
idea for the Master of Ballantrae came to him. 
Gradually it took shape in his mind, and the out- 
line of the story lay clear before him. **I need 
not tell my brothers of the craft," he says, "that 
I was now in the most interesting moment of an 
author's life; the hours that followed that night 
upon the balcony, and the following nights and 
days, whether walking abroad or lying wakeful 
in my bed, were hours of unadulterated joy." ^ 

The character of the life lived at Saranac nat- 
urally brought the little company into close 

1 Graham Balfour's Life. 

[118] 



America and the South Seas 

association and interdependence, and it was 
perhaps as an outcome of this that Stevenson 
and Lloyd Osbourne began the practice of Hter- 
ary collaboration which ultimately produced The 
Wrecker, The Ebb Tide, and The Wrong Box. 
None of these books rank with his best work, and 
it is doubtful whether the collaboration was of 
real advantage to either partner. But it is cer- 
tain that Stevenson enjoyed it. The comrade- 
ship pleased him, and he came back to his work 
with fresh zest after having for a time given it 
over into his stepson's hands. 

But besides those connected with the making of 
books, thGx'e were other plans and possibilities to 
be discussed when the party gathered round the 
homelike log fire — the only one in the house — 
that burned in the living-room during the long 
evenings of that bitter winter. Saranac had never 
been looked upon as more than a temporary rest- 
ing-place, and both ladies were looking forward 
eagerly to leaving it as soon as the spring weather 
should make travelling possible. The great ques- 
tion was. Where should they go next? Stevenson 
gave his voice in favour of a yacht and a cruise 
along the Atlantic seaboard. To possess a yacht 
had been one of his dreams since his very early 
days, and though this was still beyond his reach, 
yet it would be something to hire a yacht and 
make believe for a time that the dream had come 
true. His income from literature, which during 
the years at Bournemouth had averaged about 

[119] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

£400 annually, showed now a prospect of a large 
and rapid increase, and he had besides the sum 
of £2000 left him by his father. So ways and 
means were discussed and plans made; the yacht 
was furnished and fitted up throughout according 
to the taste of the would-be voyagers, and noth- 
ing remained now but to find her. 

The first steps were taken by Mrs Louis Steven- 
son. At the end of March she started for Cali- 
fornia to visit some of her own people. Stevenson 
remained at Saranac until the middle of April; 
then he spent some time at New York, and after- 
ward went with his mother and stepson to an hotel 
near the mouth of the Manasquau, a river of New 
Jersey. It was here that a telegram arrived from 
his wife telling him that the yacht Casco might 
be hired for a trip among the islands of the 
South Seas, and without hesitation he telegraphed 
back authorizing her to close with the offer. 

He quickly followed up his message, and by 
June 7th w^as at San Francisco. He fell in love 
at once with the graceful, birdlike Casco, and prep- 
arations for a start were hurried on. The yacht, 
in fact, was found not as seaworthy as she was 
beautiful, but defects of construction were over- 
looked in the anxiety to leave San Francisco, the 
climate of which was having a very bad effect upon 
Stevenson's health. By June 26th all was ready, 
and with a skilful, experienced skipper, four not 
entirely satisfactory deck hands, and five passen- 
gers, she put to sea and the great cruise began. 

[120] 



America and the South Seas 

It had been decided, after much discussion, to 
start first for the Marquesas, a group of islands 
of volcanic origin that lay three thousand miles 
almost due west of San Francisco. For twenty- 
two days the Casco sailed across the Pacific Ocean, 
with no land in sight; and day by day Stevenson 
grew stronger and the whole party more and more 
delighted with this 'dream come true.' On the 
twenty-third day, at dawn, they sighted land. 
"The first experience can never be repeated. The 
first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea 
island are memories apart, and touched a virgin- 
ity of sense." ^ By four o'clock the party had 
gathered on the deck waiting in the silence of 
expectation for the vision that would come with 
the light. Slowly the islands took shape — 
Nukahiva, for which the Casco was bound, rising 
gradually from a mass of cloud. "The land 
heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in 
cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty 
modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; 
and it was crowned above by two opalescent 
clouds." ^ The Casco headed her course along the 
shore. The surf broke heavily upon the beach 
and a few birds skimmed along the waters; but 
there was no sight or sound upon the island to 
tell of the presence of man or beast. Beyond the 
tall cliffs the mountains were piled up height upon 
height, bare for the most part, but sheltering here 
and there the waifs and strays of the forest below, 
* In the South Seas. ^ Ibid. 

[121] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

that had crept up into their nooks and crevices. 
The Casco rounded a point, and entered a small 
inlet; and here, where the shores fell, a lovely 
pastoral scene was spread out before the eyes of 
the travellers. Under a grove of palm trees on 
the beach stood the native village; higher up 
upon the hillside were one or two houses of white 
settlers, each with its patch of cultivated ground; 
the song of birds, the bleating of lambs, the scent 
of a hundred fruits and flowers flowed forth to 
meet the travellers. "The schooner turned upon 
her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small 
sound, a great event; my soul went down with 
these moorings whence no windlass may extract 
nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of 
my ship's company, were from that hour the 
bondslaves of the isles of Vivien." ^ 

Thus Stevenson gave in his allegiance to those 
kindly isles whose soft airs floating in from the 
sea were to bring him back to that "ordinary 
life of a human being" from which he had been 
so long shut out. He grew to love these new lands 
so dearly, that at times he felt a pang of shame, 
as for some failure in loyalty toward the land of 
his fathers. But more and more as he travelled 
among the natives of the South Seas — whom 
no bribe, he said, would induce him to call savages 
— he felt how very closely all the families of the 
earth were related; and he loved to trace out 
analogies between the history and conditions of 

* In the South Seas. 

[122] 



America and the South Seas 

life of these Pacific tribes and those of the race 
he knew best — the Scots folk of the remote 
Highland districts at home. It is, of course, a 
truism that human nature is at bottom the same 
all the world over; yet it is rare to find the per- 
ception of this fact living and bringing forth fruit 
in a man as it lived and brought forth fruit in 
Stevenson. It taught him an unerring tact, by 
means of which he could draw near to men and 
women with whom he appeared to have nothing 
in common; and here in the South Seas it un- 
locked the hearts of these gentle-hearted, dignified 
natives, so that they spoke to the strange white 
man with the sense of kinship strong upon them. 
"It is this sense of kinship that the traveller must 
rouse and share," says Stevenson, "or he had 
better content himself with travels from the blue 
bed to the brown." For three weeks the Casco 
lay at anchor in the harbour of Anaho, and the 
little hamlet was in a flutter of excitement. The 
resident white trader declared that never, in his 
experience, had the people worked so industri- 
ously at cotton-picking as during these weeks. 
Generally it was impossible to induce them to do 
more work than would suffice to provide them 
with the bare means of living; but now every 
woman must have a new dress and every man a 
new shirt and trousers, that all might go in dig- 
nified fashion to pay their ceremonial visit to the 
Casco. Many parties of tall, handsome, grace- 
ful Marquesans were received upon the yacht. 

[ ns ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

Stevenson himself acted as showman, and gravely 
exhibited all the splendours of fittings and furni- 
ture; and the beautiful, well-kept ship received 
praise enough to satisfy even his proprietary pride. 
When the show was over the visitors were enter- 
tained in the cabin to biscuit, jam and syrup; 
and, quite in the approved manner of tea-parties 
in England, the photograph album, with its por- 
traits of Queen Victoria and other celebrities, was 
passed round. The delighted natives were not 
slow to offer hospitalities in return; and in their 
fae'pae-hae, or terraced houses, the party from 
the yacht were received with every sign of honour. 
There was much lamentation when the Casco left 
Anaho and sailed round the island to Taiohae, 
the port of entry. Here lived the French Resi- 
dent — for the island was under the rule of France 
— and here was the prison, governed upon a novel 
and eminently lenient system, which allowed the 
prisoners to be out as much as they pleased all 
day if they returned, like children, to their home 
at night. When Stevenson paid his visit, the 
prison was empty; the men, he was informed, 
were out on the mountains hunting goats, and the 
women were paying calls. 

At Taiohae a native pilot was taken on board 
to guide the ship through the difficult passage 
they were now approaching, and after a twelve- 
days' stay at Hiva-va — an island where canni- 
balism was still common — the Casco sailed for 
the Dangerous Archipelago — a sea thickly stud- 



America and the South Seas 

ded with low-lying coral islands. There were few 
lights to guide vessels through the intricate chan- 
nels that wound between these islands, and no 
adequate chart; and the danger was increased by 
changing winds and confused currents. Several 
times the course was miscalculated, and the Casco 
found herself where, according to the reckoning, 
she certainly had no right to be. But at last 
Fakarava, the capital of the group, was reached 
in safety, and the Casco entered the lagoon. A 
fortnight was spent at Fakarava, Stevenson and 
his family leaving their ship, and living in a native 
house among the palms. In the last week of 
September they sailed for Tahiti. 

Tahiti is generally considered by travellers the 
most beautiful of all the beautiful islands of the 
South Seas. But it threatened at first to be an 
unfortunate island for the Stevensons. Louis had 
caught cold at Fakarava, and by the time he 
landed at Papeete, the capital of the Society 
group, the cough and fever had increased alarm- 
ingly. After a few days he grew a little better, 
but he did not like Papeete, and it was agreed to 
go round to Taravao, on the south side of the 
island. Twice during this two days' passage the 
Casco was nearly wrecked; and when at last the 
party landed at Taravao, it was only to find a 
close, mosquito-infested atmosphere, in which 
Stevenson grew rapidly worse. The Captain and 
Lloyd Osbourne set off on an expedition inland, 
but came back with a report that they could find 

[125] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

no one who had horses or carriage for the removal 
of the invahd save a Chinaman, and he was un- 
willing to allow them to be hired. Mrs Stevenson 
therefore set off next day, and by her entreaties 
induced the Chinaman to let her have wagon and 
horses. Stevenson was placed in the wagon, and, 
with the help of Valentine Roch, his wife managed 
to bring him safely over sixteen miles of rough 
road, crossed by twenty-one streams, to the small 
village of Tautira. By the time he was installed 
in the miserable house which was all they could 
secure for him he was in a state of collapse. 

Next day they were visited by Princess Moe, 
the Queen of Raiatea, who, hearing that a white 
man was lying very ill at Tautira, came over to 
see if she could give any help. As soon as the 
patient was a little recovered she invited the 
whole party to live with her in the commodious 
house of Ori, the sub-chief of the village. Ori, 
with his wife and family, willingly moved into 
one of the native huts. In his new quarters 
Stevenson grew rapidly better, and it seemed as 
if, for a time, their troubles were over. Bad news, 
however, came from the schooner. It was dis- 
covered, first, that the jib-boom was sprung, and 
then, when that had been repaired, the two masts 
were found to be almost eaten out with dry-rot, 
so that it was a miracle that the voyage so far 
had been made without accident. With all pos- 
sible precautions the schooner put back to Papeete 
for repairs, and the Stevensons were confined to 

[126] 



America aitd the South Seas 

the island until such time as she could be made 
seaworthy. They spent their days very happily. 
Stevenson was now quite well again, and revelling 
in the soft air, the lovely scenes, and the delight- 
ful people that surrounded him. *'I write to you 
from fairyland," said Mrs Stevenson in a letter 
to Sir Sidney Colvin, "where we are living in a 
fairy story, the guests of a beautiful brown prin- 
cess." Her husband and her son, she went on 
to tell, roamed all day about the island, Louis 
dressed in a pyjama suit of light striped flannel, 
Lloyd in a light flannel shirt and pareu — that is, 
a large blue and white cotton window curtain, 
twisted about the waist, and hanging a little 
below the bare knees. Neither wore shoes or 
stockings, and both had wreaths of artificial 
flowers made of dried pandunis leaf round their 
hats. They bathed in the sea almost every day, 
they hunted for shells, and clambered over rocks, 
and lay luxuriously basking in the sun all through 
the month of November. They enjoyed the novel 
food — the luncheons of raw fish, with sauce of 
cocoanut milk mixed with sea-water and lime 
juice, bananas roasted between hot stones in a 
little pit in the ground, and eaten with cocoanut 
cream, roast pig served with miti, and palm-tree 
salad; and Stevenson wrote home that at some of 
the island feasts he had "been known to apply 
four times for pig." Princess Moe arranged enter- 
tainments, at which the old songs and dances of 
Tahiti were performed for their benefit. When 

[ 127 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

she was recalled to Papeete by command of the 
king, Ori became then* host. He was a fine 
fellow, "a lifeguardsman in appearance, six foot 
three in bare feet; deep and broad in proportion; 
unconsciously English to an absurd extent." He 
adopted Stevenson into his clan and changed 
names with him, so that the Englishman hence- 
forth might claim the designation of Teriitera. 
The whole party adapted themselves readily and 
happily to the customs of the island, and estab- 
lished the warmest relations with their enter- 
tainers. To Mrs Stevenson these weeks on shore 
came as a welcome respite from life on board the 
yacht; for to her the tour was not one of unmixed 
enjoyment. ''I hate the sea," she said, *'and am 
afraid of it; . . . but I love the tropic weather 
and the wild people and to see my two boys so 
happy." 

As soon as his health allowed him Stevenson 
resumed his work. Before he started on his tour 
in the South Seas a firm of American publishers, 
Messrs McClure, had offered him £2000 for a 
book descriptive of his travels, and this money 
was to help pay the expenses of the voyage. At 
every place, therefore, he busied himself in collect- 
ing materials. At Tautira he gathered a great 
store of songs and legends, and wrote two bal- 
lads, ''The Feast of Famine" and ''The Song of 
Rahero," founded upon traditions of the islands. 
In addition to work upon his travels he resumed 
and almost finished The Master of Ballantrae. 

[128] 



America and the South Seas 

December came and still the Casco was not 
ready. Bad weather had set in, and the seas 
along the coast ran too high for the small native 
boats to attempt the voyage to Papeete, while 
swollen rivers rendered a journey across the island 
impossible. Stevenson's money was all gone, and 
the daily food of the party was supplied by their 
generous hosts. Day by day their anxiety in- 
creased, and the sympathetic natives joined with 
them in watching eagerly for the white sails of 
the Casco. At last Ori with a party of young 
men braved the stormy seas, and went in a whale- 
boat to Papeete. They were delayed a week 
beyond the expected time, but at last, to the 
relief and delight of the whole village, they ap- 
peared, bringing money and stores and a letter 
from the captain of the Casco, There was a grand 
dinner next day, at which a basket of champagne 
was produced. Ori drank the glass that was 
poured out for him with delight. "I shall drink 
it continually," he said, and poured out another 
glass for himself. *'What is the cost of it by the 
bottle?" He was told, and he put down his glass 
with its contents untasted. *'It is not fit that 
even kings should drink a wine so expensive," he 
solemnly pronounced; and so he forswore this new 
delight. On Christmas Day, 1888, the Steven- 
sons left Tahiti in the Casco, bound for Honolulu. 
The parting from their island friends, whom dur- 
ing their two months' stay they had really learned 
to love, was so painful, that one and all agreed a 

[ 129 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

succession of such experiences would be too har- 
rowing to be borne; short stays and no close 
intimacies must be henceforth the rule. 

After considerable delay, through calms and 
contrary winds, the Casco at length reached Hono- 
lulu. Mrs Stevenson's daughter, who had married 
and was now Mrs Strong, was living in Honolulu 
and waiting to welcome them. The yacht was 
sent back to San Francisco, a house was taken on 
the coast just outside the town, and here they 
established themselves, waiting for the summer, 
when they intended to return to England. Valen- 
tine Roch had gone back to America, but a na- 
tive cook, Ah Fu, engaged in Nukahiva, was 
proving himself a treasure in the kitchen. The 
stay at Honolulu Stevenson described as *'a 
spasm of activity chequered with champagne 
parties." The activity had to do with his liter- 
ary work, which he made haste to take in hand, 
for The Master of Ballantrae was being published 
as a serial in Scribner's Magazine, and the end 
was not yet written. To finish it was, Stevenson 
said, the hardest job he ever had to do; and in 
May he wrote that The Master was finished, and 
he himself quite a wreck. The 'champagne 
parties' included all those festivities to which his 
step-daughter, who had many acquaintances in 
this island, introduced him, and especially the 
festivities of the royal palace. With the king he 
formed a close intimacy which almost amounted 
to a friendship, and he joined with zest in all that 

[130] 



America and the South Seas 

was going on. But on the whole he did not care 
for Honolulu. He had not been really well since 
he left the ship, though he had never been en- 
tirely incapacitated, and it very soon became clear 
that he was not yet fitted to face even a compara- 
tively cold climate. The idea of returning to 
England was therefore given up. He lacked 
courage, he said, to return to his old life of the 
house and the sickroom after these active months 
passed in the open air. Plans were therefore 
made for another cruise, and in the meantime he 
made short voyages to islands within easy reach. 
The most notable of these was the visit he paid 
to Molokai, where, by special permission, he 
spent a week in the leper settlement, in which 
Father Damien had laboured so heroically, and 
where, not two months before, he had died. 
With a party of Roman Catholic sisters, and about 
a dozen lepers who were being sent out to the 
settlement, Stevenson travelled by steamer from 
Honolulu to Molokai. **I do not know how it 
would have been with me," he said, "had the 
sisters not been there. My horror of the horri- 
ble is about my weakest point; but the moral 
loveliness at my elbow blotted all else out; and 
when I found that one of them was crying, poor 
soul, quietly under her veil, I cried a little myself; 
then I felt as right as a trivet, only a little crushed 
to be there so uselessly." ^ When the boat 
arrived at the landing stairs hundreds of lepers, 

^ The Lexers of Robert Louis Stevenson. 

[131] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

** pantomime masks in poor human flesh," came 
down to meet the sisters and the new patients, 
but Stevenson was able to greet them without 
any sign of disgust, and landed calmly with the 
rest of the party. The leper settlement was built 
on a low, bare, stony promontory behind which 
the cliff rose like a great wall, shutting it off from 
the rest of the island. A cluster of little brown* 
wooden houses and a church stood on each side 
of the promontory, "as bare almost as bathing 
machines upon a bench"; and all was *' unsightly, 
sour, northerly," sanctified only by the *' horror 
of moral beauty" that brooded over it. 

During his stay Stevenson played tennis with 
the leper girls, went to tea with the sisters, and 
walked about freely among the patients. He 
heard a great deal of Father Damien and his 
labours, so that when two years later he read in 
an Australian religious paper a letter from Dr 
Hyde, a Presbyterian minister in Honolulu, de- 
preciating and slandering this man whom he 
regarded as a hero, his indignation was aroused. 
He wrote the celebrated open letter to Dr Hyde, 
which was published first in Sydney and after- 
ward in Edinburgh. It laid him open to a charge 
of libel, but for this he did not care. He faced 
the ruin that might come cheerfully, that he 
might clear the memory of one whom he con- 
sidered to be a great man. 

It was decided that in the next cruise the Gil- 
bert Islands should be visited. So far Stevenson's 

[m] 




FATHER DAMIEN 



America and the South Seas 

experience had been confined to high, rocky, very 
thinly populated islands, under foreign domina- 
tion. The Gilbert Islands are ivi almost every 
particular of a quite different character. The 
group lies near the Equator, and consists of six- 
teen low islands, of coral formation, thickly popu- 
lated, and at that time almost every island was 
governed by an independent king. The inhabi- 
tants are darker and shorter than the races living 
in the 'high' islands, as well as more energetic 
and more ferocious. 

During May and June preparations for the 
cruise were going on. A trading schooner, the 
Equator, was chartered, and stores were laid in. 
Experience had taught the Stevensons what was 
most needed in the regions to which they were 
going, and besides provisions for the voyage they 
carried with them a magic lantern, an American 
hand organ, cigars, tobacco, fish-hooks, combs, 
turkey-red calico, a fiddle and a guitar for the 
benefit of the natives. Stevenson's mother had 
decided not to accompany them on this cruise 
and had returned to Scotland. The rest of the 
party, including Ah Fu, set sail on June 24th, 
1889, while King Kalakaua stood on the shore 
waving his hand in farewell, and his band of 
native musicians sent sad parting strains over the 
water. 

As soon as the Equator was well away from 
Honolulu Stevenson's health began to improve. 
He felt more and more strongly that the life that 

[ 133] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

would give him the greatest amount of health 
and happiness was a life on the sea. But the 
expenses were very heavy, and to meet them it 
was necessary that some new work should at 
once be begun. Very soon after they left Hono- 
lulu a chance incident suggested an idea for a 
story. This was talked over by Stevenson and 
his stepson, and they set to work to write the 
book together, intending to complete it as quickly 
as possible and send it to a publisher from Samoa, 
which was in direct communication with London. 
The schooner arrived without accident at Buta- 
ritari, on the island of Great Makin. The stretch 
of land by the shore was crowded with brown- 
roofed houses; and the King's palace, with its 
roof of corrugated iron, shone out in splendour on 
one side. The party landed and found the town 
silent and deserted. As they advanced toward 
the palace they met no one, but looking in through 
the open fronts of the houses they saw groups of 
men, women and children all lying fast asleep. 
They reached the palace and entered the summer 
parlour, where the King and his court, some 
twenty in all, were assembled. The King, Tebu- 
reimoa, lolled upon a mat. He was a corpulent, 
drowsy, timorous-looking man, dressed in pyjamas 
"which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk." He 
took little interest in the new-comers, and gave 
them permission through his interpreter — *' an 
American darkey, runaway ship's cook "^^ to 
make what arrangements they pleased for their 

[134] 



America and the South Seas 

lodging. Within an hour of leaving the palace 
they were established in the house of Maka, the 
Hawaiian missionary, who was then absent from 
the island. The night passed quietly, but the 
next day they discovered the reason for the state 
of things they had observed on their arrival. The 
town was sleeping off the effects of a drunken 
debauch, and thus preparing for a fresh debauch 
on the morrow. Nine days before, the King had, 
in celebration of the fourth of July, the day of 
American Independence, removed the tapu (or 
taboo) upon intoxicating liquors, and ever since 
he and his subjects had been almost constantly 
drunk. The danger to the white inhabitants of 
the town was great; for the most trifling circum- 
stances might, in the present temper of the na- 
tives, lead to an outbreak. Great efforts were 
made to induce the King to re-impose the tapu. 
A deputation was sent to the palace, and he was 
informed by the wife of the consular agent for the 
United States, who acted as interpreter, that Mr 
Stevenson was an intimate, personal friend of 
Queen Victoria's, and that if he or his family 
suffered injury or annoyance the offence would 
be immediately reported, and a man-of-war sent 
out to execute vengeance. It was, as Stevenson 
says, *' scarce the fact," but ''rather a just and 
necessary parable of the fact corrected for lati- 
tude." It had an effect upon the King, though 
not the effect desired; he tapu'd the missionary's 
house, but refused to stop the drinking. So 

[135] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

things went on for another week, and then, when 
Stevenson and his family were sitting in the 
lampHght after dinner under a trelHs in the en- 
closure belonging to the house, a missile suddenly 
struck the table and rebounded past his ear. 
*' Three inches to one side," he says, *'and this 
page had never been written, for the thing trav- 
elled like a cannon ball." The next evening, 
under exactly similar circumstances, the incident 
was repeated, to the general alarm, for those who 
knew the natives well declared that it meant more 
than ordinary mischief. One of the two liquor 
stores on the island had already refused to supply 
the natives with strong drink; Stevenson now 
approached the keeper of the other with urgent 
representations of the threatened danger. Prepa- 
rations were being made for a feast at which the 
chiefs from tributary islands were to be present 
with their followers; and if the drunken orgy 
continued it could scarcely be hoped that this 
would pass without an outbreak. Fortunately 
the store-keeper listened and was persuaded, and 
the supply was stopped. There remained now the 
danger from the fury of the baffled natives; but 
this too was averted, for early next morning the 
King re-imposed the tapu, and the island returned 
to its customary sobriety. This was the only 
time during all his wanderings that Stevenson was 
in danger of bodily harm from a native popula- 
tion; and even the inhabitants of Butaritari, 
their fit of madness over, treated him with the 

C 136 ] 



America and the South Seas 

friendliest consideration. He stayed for several 
weeks longer without adventure of any kind; 
showed the magic lantern and took various photo- 
graphs; then when the Equator, which had been 
absent on a trading cruise, returned, the party 
went on board and sailed away. 

They visited next Apemama, a large island ruled 
by King Tembinok. ''There is one great person- 
age in the Gilberts," says Stevenson, "Tembinok 
of Apemama: solely conspicuous, the hero of song, 
the butt of gossip." Scarcely was the Equator 
moored off the north side of the island before 
preparations were made for the King to come 
aboard, and presently, with a crowd of followers 
in attendant vessels, he put off from the shore. 
He was, like Tebureimoa, heavy and corpulent, 
and his gait was "dull, stumbling, and elephan- 
tine." He had "a beaked profile, like Dante's 
in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the eye 
brilliant, imperious, and inquiring." His voice 
was "shrill, powerful, and uncanny, with a note 
like a sea-bird's. Where there are no fashions, 
none to set them, few to follow them if they were 
set, and none to criticize, he dresses 'to his own 
heart.' Now he wears a woman's frock, now a 
naval uniform; now (and more usually) figures 
in a masquerade costume of his own design; 
trousers and a singular jacket with shirt tails, 
the cut and fit wonderful for island workmanship, 
the material always handsome, sometimes green 
velvet, sometimes cardinal red silk. This mas- 

[137] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

querade becomes him admirably. In a woman's 
frock he looks ominous and weird beyond belief." ^ 
Stevenson was especially anxious to spend some 
time in Apemama, partly because he wished to 
study this renowned Tembinok, partly because the 
old customs of the islands were preserved there 
to a greater degree than anywhere else. But no 
one was allowed to land without the King's per- 
mission, and this was not too readily given. The 
captain of the Equator preferred Stevenson's 
request almost as soon as the King came on board, 
dwelling on the would-be visitor's virtues, and the 
high position he held in his own land. The King 
listened, but, without making any answer, began 
to talk upon another subject, and did not refer 
in any way to the petition before leaving the ship 
in the evening. But it was noticed that as he 
sat at meals with the strangers he intently studied 
the face of each in turn. Next day he came 
again, and once more the faces of the party were 
the objects of his thoughtful scrutiny. Not until 
the afternoon, however, did he give his answer, 
but when it came it was a favourable one. '*I 
look your eye. You good man. You no lie," 
he said to Stevenson, and henceforward he showed 
the utmost kindness and liberality toward them. 
He allowed them to choose a site for their settle- 
ment, and this his people cleared the next day, 
and erected upon it two maniaps, or tents, and 
two native houses. By dusk all was finished, and 

^ In the South Seas. 

[138] 



America and the South Seas 

the whole enclosure, which was called 'Equator 
Town,' in honour of the ship, tapu'd, so that 
there was no danger of interference from the 
natives; and two very interesting and pleasant 
months were spent in this novel dwelling. All 
the members of the party soon became great fa- 
vorites with the King, and were free at all times 
to visit the palace, where he lived with his mother, 
his sister, and a vast company of wives. These 
wives he usually referred to as ''my pamily." 
There were no male officers in the palace; all 
positions of trust were held by the wives. They 
were key-bearers, treasurers, wardens of the ar- 
moury, the napery and the stores, sentries, guards, 
and servants. They had in charge vast hoards 
of miscellaneous articles that the King had col- 
lected, for, in spite of his shrewdness, he had a 
mania for buying every article, useful or useless, 
that was brought by traders to the island. Clocks, 
musical boxes, blue spectacles, umbrellas, knitted 
waistcoats, rolls of stuff, tools, rifles, fowling-pieces, 
medicines, European foods, sewing-machines, stoves 
— chest after chest in the palace was crammed 
with these things. Yet that member of the 
'pamily' in whose charge any particular article 
was placed could always produce it, in perfect 
order, at whatever moment it was called for; and 
the other duties of the household were performed 
with equal efficiency. 

Over all his subjects Tembinok's authority was 
absolute, and his visitors soon learned to admire 

C 139 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

the firmness of his rule, and the abihty with which 
he managed the innumerable concerns in which 
he was engaged. Besides being the sole ruler he 
was the sole trader in the island, and made his 
bargains — except with regard to the treasures 
from Europe already mentioned — with great 
shrewdness. He had learnt to read and write 
from the missionaries whom he had readily re- 
ceived into the island, but whom, later, when, 
as he believed, they began to aim at a domina- 
tion other than spiritual, he had banished. *'I 
send him away ship," he explained to Stevenson, 
and every visitor or settler who had attempted 
to interfere with his plans had met with the same 
fate. His name was a terror both at home and 
in all the islands round, for, though he was 
neither cruel nor vindictive, when his wrath was 
once aroused his vengeance was swift and terrible. 

With this man Stevenson lived in intimate 
association for two months, and when the time 
came for the visitors to leave Apemama, the King 
was deeply dejected. No efforts of consolation 
made by his 'pamily' had any effect. He him- 
self took the party on board, shook each one by 
the hand and departed almost in silence, and they, 
although they felt for him none of the affection 
that they had felt for Ori and Moe, were sorry to 
say good-bye to one whom they really respected 
and admired. 

The Equator touched once more at Butaritari, 
and then went on to the Samoan islands. On 

[140] 



America and the South Seas 

December 7th she arrived at Apia, the capital 
and port of Upolu, the chief island of the group. 
The Samoan are *high' or volcanic islands, and 
here, to his great delight, Stevenson was "once 
more refreshed with the sight of mountains." 
*'For six months," he says, "we had seen no spot 
of earth so high as an ordinary cottage. Our 
path had been still on the flat sea, our dwelling 
upon unerected coral, our diet from the pickle- 
tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome 
shark's flesh for a variety; and a mountain, an 
onion, an Irish potato or a beefsteak, had been 
long lost to sense and dear to aspiration." ^ The 
fruits and other luxuries of Upolu were therefore 
highly prized. 

The time for which the Equator had been char- 
tered having expired, she proceeded on her home- 
ward journey, and Stevenson settled in a cottage 
just outside the town. After a short time he 
accepted the invitation given him by Mr H. J. 
Moors, an American merchant, and with his family 
became the guest of that gentleman at his house 
in Apia. The removal was made chiefly in the 
interests of Stevenson's work, for he was busy 
collecting material for his book on the South Seas, 
and was glad to avail himself of the help that was 
courteously given him by the various European 
officials and white inhabitants of the town. From 
them he obtained much information with regard 
to the late war, which had placed the Samoan 

^ In the South Seas. 

[141] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

islands under the joint rule of the three great 
powers — Germany, England, and the United 
States. A native king, Malietoa Laupepa, had 
been set up, but his position among the native 
population was not one of great authority. He 
had a kinsman, Mataafa, whose claim to the 
throne was almost, if not quite, as strong as his 
own, but who, having during the late troubles 
been active against the Germans, had been quite 
overlooked in the recent arrangements. Mataafa 
naturally expected that his kinsman would give 
him an honourable position among his counsellors, 
especially as he was extremely popular in the 
island. But Laupepa persisted in ignoring him, 
and Mataafa, deeply offended, set up a kind of 
opposition court just outside the capital. To 
the impartial inquirer, who was endeavouring 
honestly to find out the facts of the case, a mass 
of confused and contradictory evidence was forth- 
coming from the partisans on either side, and it 
was with this mass of evidence that Stevenson 
proceeded to deal. It was a difficult and a weary- 
ing task, but he gave to it the patient industry 
and untiring enthusiasm which went into all his 
work, and in A Footnote to History, which he after- 
ward published, he gave a most valuable exposi- 
tion of the political situation in Samoa. 

From Apia he made various expeditions to 
other parts of the island, and came gradually to 
the conclusion that Upolu would be the most 
favourable spot for the winter home that he had 

[142] 



America and the South Seas 

now resolved to establish. The island was not as 
beautiful as others that he had visited, and its 
people were not specially attractive. But the 
climate suited him; he had no illness such as had 
troubled him during his stay at Honolulu, and he 
had been able to work regularly during the whole 
time he had spent at TJpolu. Moreover, and this 
was a crowning advantage, the means of communi- 
cation with Europe were exceptionally good. The 
monthly steamers between Sydney and San Fran- 
cisco called at Apia; a German steamer, the 
Liihech, ran regularly between Apia and Sydney, 
and the New Zealand boat, the Richmond, called 
on her circular trip from Auckland to Tahiti. 
Stevenson bought, therefore, about three hundred 
acres of land lying on the heights behind Apia. 
The whole tract was covered with bush, amid 
which rose at intervals giant forest trees; even 
the narrow, winding path bordered with limes that 
led through it was overgrown and in places almost 
impassable. The eastern boundary was formed by 
the Vaisigano, the principal river of the island. 
On the west side ran a stream made up of a num- 
ber of mountain torrents that came rushing down 
the steep side of the Vaea Mountain; and it was 
from this stream and its four chief tributaries 
that Stevenson gave to his estate the name of 
'Vailima' or 'Five Waters.' 

Early in February the party sailed for Sydney, 
intending to go on from there to England. But 
unfortunately Stevenson took cold, and a bad 

[143] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

attack of haemorrhage followed. Both he and his 
wife felt that there was nothing to be done but 
to return to those regions where for eighteen 
months he had lived without one of these distress- 
ing attacks. They still hoped, however, to be 
able to pay a visit to England later in the year, 
and a telegram was sent off to the waiting friends 
at home: *' Return Islands four months. Home 
September." The next thing was to find a ship, 
and after having been twice absolutely refused, 
Mrs Stevenson at last induced the owners of a 
trading steamer, the Janet Nicoll, then on the 
point of starting on a cruise among the islands, 
to allow her party of three a passage. The voyage 
quickly restored the invalid, and with no other 
adventure than a fire in the cabin, in which all 
Stevenson's manuscripts were in great danger of 
destruction, they came to Apia, where the steamer 
put in for a few days. Then they went on to the 
Gilbert and Marshall groups, putting in for a few 
hours at one island after another, but making no 
prolonged stay anywhere. At Apemama they 
saw King Tembinok, and heard from him the 
news of various disasters, notably an attack of 
measles, from which his island had suffered since 
their last visit. Then the vessel turned south- 
ward, and calling at New California on the way, 
went on direct to Sydney. Stevenson was left 
behind at Noumea, where he wished to inspect 
the French convict settlement, and followed his 
wife and stepson a few days later. 

[ 144 ] 



America and the South Seas 

The state of his health when he arrived at 
Sydney made it clear that there could be no visit 
to England that year. The improvement shown 
at the beginning of the voyage had not been 
maintained, and a second haemorrhage had still 
further reduced his strength. Lloyd Osbourne, 
therefore, went on alone to England, with instruc- 
tions to make the arrangements necessary for his 
stepfather's prolonged absence abroad, and to 
send out the Skerryvore furniture to Samoa. 
Stevenson and his wife, after a short stay at 
Sydney, during which he was confined to his room, 
returned in October 1890 to Upolu, where a con- 
siderable portion of his land had by this time been 
cleared, and a four-roomed wooden house erected 
to serve as a temporary dwelling-place. 



[145] 



CHAPTER VIII: Failima 

SINCE the old days in Heriot Row Steven- 
son had not known what it was to have a 
home; for Skerry vore and Hyeres, where 
he had spent the longest periods, can scarcely be 
regarded as anything but experimental settle- 
ments, liable to be broken up at a moment's 
notice. He never really took possession of them 
in the sense of associating them with his future 
plans or impressing his personality upon them. 
For this attitude of detachment his health, which 
made it impossible for him to settle in his own 
country, was mainly responsible. But there was 
about him also a natural aloofness that made all 
bonds, even the kindly bonds of home, intolerable. 
The detachment from material things, which in 
his youth he had advocated with such whimsical 
earnestness, was, shorn of the absurdities and 
extravagances with which he had chosen to invest 
it, really a fundamental part of his nature, and 
was somehow expressed, his friends tell us, in his 
frail body, his quick, graceful movements, his 
mobile face and bright, glancing eyes. To think 
of Robert Louis Stevenson as an ordinary British 
householder, interested in his chairs and tables, 
absorbed in his garden, and deeply concerned in the 
small affairs of his parish, would have struck even 
his casual acquaintances as a manifest incongruity. 
It seemed almost as if the home-making instinct, 
which to men like Sir Walter Scott supplies the 
motive power of life, was in him entirely wanting. 

[ 146] 



Vailima 

But, after all his wanderings, here in the utter- 
most parts of the earth the desire to make a home 
for himself and his family came upon him, and he 
set to work with characteristic directness and 
energy. For three and a half years he was as 
absorbed in clearing and planting and building on 
his estate of the Five Waters as ever Scott had 
been in the development of Abbotsford, and as 
interested in his *' blacks and chocolates" as Sir 
Walter in his Tweedside peasants. ^^ Nothing, ^^ 
he wrote to Colvin in November 1890, "is so 
interesting as weeding, clearing and path-making." 
He was obliged to make stern resolutions to con- 
fine himself to the house, or no literary work at 
all would have been done; and, with the heavy 
expenses of establishing a plantation and building 
a house added to those already incurred in the 
South Sea cruises, there was urgent need for this 
money-making labour. But often the tempta- 
tion to be *' bossing his labourers" and working 
with his hands at outdoor matters became too 
strong to be resisted, and he would steal half- 
guiltily away. He had always exulted in manual 
labour, probably because the chances of under- 
taking it had come so seldom in his life; and now, 
in the kindly Samoan air, he really felt that he 
could work like other men. He laboured with his 
'boys,' cutting down bush and burning out tree- 
stumps till his hands were blistered and torn. 
He fought great fights with the tuitui, or sensitive 
plant, that singular, insidious thing which was the 

[147] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

deadliest enemy the island planters had to deal 
with; and he had hand-to-hand skirmishes with 
the wild lime that fought so tenaciously with its 
spines and elastic suckers. Moreover, he con- 
ceived the plan of making a path up the Vaituliga 
— one of his 'five streams' — single-handed, and 
stole away gleefully to this work whenever he 
could make an opportunity, labouring hard and 
secretly so that his path might "burst upon the 
public complete." He was stung by poisonous 
plants, and nearly hung by the tough lianas; he 
waded knee-deep in ice-cold streams, and came 
home looking like a "mud-statue" — and all this 
during November and December, the months 
which, had he been in England, he would have 
passed in a sick-room with terrors of colds and 
alarms of haemorrhages. It is, after all, not won- 
derful that he loved his home in the South Seas. 
Each day, moreover, had its unexpected alarms 
and excursions. First it was the black sow which 
got loose and for twelve hours baffled the attempts 
of the entire family and eight hired 'boys' to 
recapture her; then it was the two great New 
Zealand hack-horses which were overdriven by a 
zealous but inexperienced boy, and whose lives 
were only saved by a prompt and vigorous rubbing 
down — with underclothing from Mrs Stevenson's 
store, as being the readiest thing to hand. One 
evening all the horses got out of the paddock, 
went across and smashed the nearest neighbour's 
garden into a big hole; on another day all the 

C 148] 




rvAi "■:! -i%i * 



Vailima 

hired labourers left in a body through a misunder- 
standing with the 'ganger.' After such adventures 
the bursting of a case of kerosene in the kitchen, 
and the mistake made by the carpenter's horse, 
who planted his foot in a nest of fourteen eggs, 
and "made an omelette of our hopes," were 
minor excitements; and an occasional failure in 
the food supply which reduced dinner to *'one 
avocado pear between Fanny and me, a ship's 
biscuit for the guidman, white bread for the 
missis, and red wine for the twa," was merely an 
unremarkable domestic incident. 

Thus far 'Stevenson the Planter'; but there is 
also that "less estimable character" (as he himself 
puts it), Stevenson 'the Writer of Books,' to be 
considered. In spite of frequent truancies, this 
Stevenson also managed to make considerable 
way during the two closing months of 1890. He 
worked industriously at The Wrecker and the South 
Sea book, writing some chapters as many as four 
times before they seemed to him as good as he 
could make them. The South Sea book, in par- 
ticular, gave him endless trouble. He had accum- 
ulated such a vast mass of material that, as he 
said, he staggered under it. How to manipulate 
it, to build it up so that it should become "jointed 
and moving," was the problem that troubled him; 
and as he sent home one instalment of manuscript 
after another to his trusted friend and critic, 
Colvin, it became evident that he had not been 
able to command the lightness of touch that had 

[149] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

so delightfully distinguished his early books of 
travel. Mrs Stevenson, whose criticism of her 
husband's work was seldom at fault, had, when 
the book was in its earliest stages, put her finger 
upon the weak point. Louis had, she said, the 
most enchanting material in the world, but she 
was afraid he was going to spoil it. "He has 
taken it into his Scotch Stevenson head that a 
stern duty lies before him, and that his book must 
be a sort of scientific, historic, impersonal thing." 
Such a book was quite outside the range of Robert 
Louis Stevenson's powers, versatile as he was, 
and it was foredoomed to at least comparative 
failure. He himself, however, was very hopeful 
that in the end he would be able to make a book 
worthy of his material, and he went on coura- 
geously though somewhat wearily. In the respites 
he allowed himself from this heavy labour he found 
refreshment in writing verses and in planning a 
new story to be called "The High Woods of 
Ulufanua," the idea of which, he says, shot 
through him like a bullet while he was working 
alone in the depths of his tangled forest. 

By the end of the year both Stevenson and his 
wife were growing tired of life in the tiny cottage. 
There was no place where he could write without 
interruption, and no accommodation for the serv- 
ants who were necessary to relieve him and his 
wife from constant household drudgery. They 
had one ' boy ' for domestic work — a German 
named Paul, who had been a cook and steward, 

[150] 



Vailima 

"a glutton of work," but an "inveterate bungler, 
a man with twenty thumbs." His ideas of house- 
hold cleanliness were such that Mrs Stevenson 
preferred to do much of the work herself. In 
addition she superintended the pigs and the poul- 
try, and worked hard to make a garden where 
vegetables for the use of the household could be 
grown. Consequently she suffered severely from 
overwork, and when she was incapacitated her 
duties fell upon her husband. Both of them, 
therefore, were looking forward eagerly to the time 
when the new house, which was being built a little 
higher up the hill, should be completed. 

By January it was so far advanced that Steven- 
son set off to Sydney to fetch his mother and 
Lloyd Osbourne, who were waiting for him there 
on their way out from England. At Sydney he 
spent nearly a month, working hard at his book 
and living quietly and carefully; but in spite of 
his care he had a sharp attack of illness, and when 
the time came to start on the return voyage, he 
was carried on board the Liiheck *'a wonderful 
wreck." The sea air, as usual, wrought a great 
and immediate improvement, but he was still very 
weak when, toward the end of February, he 
arrived at Samoa. The new house was not yet 
habitable, so Stevenson and his wife made shift 
to use one of its lower rooms as a bedroom, that 
the elder Mrs Stevenson might be accommodated 
in the cottage. She stayed, however, only for a 
short time, then went back to Australia to wait 

c 151 : 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

until things should be farther advanced, and did 
not return until the beginning of May. With her 
came Mrs Stevenson's daughter, Mrs Strong, and 
her boy, Austin; and the family, thus enlarged, 
settled down in its new quarters. 

The house as it then stood was fairly large and 
commodious, but later it was found insufficient 
for the party, and another building about equal 
in size was added. Behind stood the kitchen and 
a native house for the cook, and round about were 
grouped milking-sheds, pig-pens, and stables. The 
original cottage was moved from its first site, and 
set up again about a hundred yards from the new 
house, where it provided additional bedrooms and 
storage accommodation. All three buildings were 
of wood painted a dark green, two-storeyed, and 
with roofs of red corrugated iron. On the ground 
floor a verandah ran round the front and one side 
of the house, and above it was built another in 
front of the library, which occupied the whole 
of that floor. This, however, made the library 
so dark that Stevenson found that he could not 
work in it. He therefore made a new study and 
bedroom for himself by having one-half of the 
verandah boarded and roofed in. This little 
chamber he furnished with a small bedstead, a 
plain deal table, two book-cases, two chairs and a 
few pictures, and here most of his work was done. 

In front of the house a beautiful lawn of smooth 
green couch grass was made, and around this a 
hibiscus hedge was planted. It grew rapidly and 

[ 152 ] 



Vailima 

was soon six feet high, and a mass of scarlet 
blossoms. A little below the house the river 
made a fall of about twelve feet, and formed a 
delightful bathing pool which was arched over 
with orange trees. The garden, which was Mrs 
Stevenson's special care, lay at a little distance 
on the left bank of the river; vegetables such as 
beans, cabbages, tomatoes and asparagus, intro- 
duced from Europe, grew freely in that rich soil, 
and many fruits and vegetables natural to the 
island were also cultivated. Higher up the stream 
were banana patches, whose produce formed an 
important part of the food of the household. 
There were stretches of pasture land for the cattle, 
swampy plots planted with taro, which was used 
as a substitute for the potato, several acres planted 
with pine-apples, and a fine plantation of kava 
shrubs, from the powdered root of which the 
Samoan national drink is made. Bread-fruit, 
cocoa-nuts, oranges, guavas and mangoes were 
cultivated, and produced abundant crops, and 
many other tropical fruits grew in a wild or semi- 
wild state. All the hedges were formed of fra- 
grant lime trees, and limes were so plentiful that 
they were used for scouring the kitchen floor and 
tables. East and west and south the clearing was 
shut in by thick bush and lofty forests; north- 
ward the land fell away to the sea, and Steven- 
son, looking out from his little writing chamber, 
could see "a nick of the blue Pacific." 

A large part of the estate was given up to 

[153] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

plantations of cacao, which Stevenson and his 
friend Mr H. J. Moors were making great efforts 
to induce the natives of Upolu to cultivate. One 
of the most characteristic pictures given by Steven- 
son of the life at Vailima is that which shows the 
whole family engaged in planting cacao. *'You 
should have seen us; the verandah was like an 
Irish bog; our hands and faces w^ere bedaubed 
with soil. . . . The cacao (you must understand) 
has to be planted at first in baskets of plaited 
cocoa-leaf. From four to ten natives were plait- 
ing these in the woodshed. Four boys were dig- 
ging up soil and bringing it by the boxful to the 
verandah. Lloyd and I and Belle . . . were fill- 
ing the baskets, removing stones and lumps of 
clay; Austin and Fauma carried them when full 
to Fanny, who planted a seed in each, and then 
set them, packed close, in the corner of the veran- 
dah. From twelve on Friday till five p.m. on 
Saturday we planted the first 1500, and more than 
700 of the second lot. You cannot dream how 
filthy we were, and we were all properly tired." 

As large tracts of the estate were thus cleared 
and planted a considerable number of regular 
outdoor hands became necessary. The new house 
also required its staff of servants. Little by little 
a small colony was established at Vailima, to 
which Stevenson was master, friend, teacher, 
doctor, lawgiver and earthly Providence. At 
first European and Colonial servants were tried. 
But it was found that these could not adapt 

[ 154 ] 



Vailima 

themselves to the work and customs of a Samoan 
estate. The German cook Paul — who came into 
a fortune and went home to 'Hie Germanic* — 
was succeeded by another of the same nationality, 
who was equally zealous and equally incompetent, 
and who quarreled with the white housemaid. 
The white overseer declared that manual labour 
was the one thing that never agreed with him, 
and objected to being called in the morning on the 
ground that a man ought to wake up "natural 
like." Various other white servants were tried, 
until the members of the household felt that they 
could bear no more. Finally a clean sweep was 
made, and a staff of natives installed, and then, 
though there were still troubles, things went more 
smoothly. Of his Samoan servants Stevenson 
speaks freely in his letters. Henry Simele, a 
"chiefling" from a neighbouring island, was the 
overseer of the plantation. Stevenson began by 
loathing him, but the loathing passed into respect 
and respect into liking, until Henry became a real 
friend. After work was over Stevenson gave him 
lessons in English, or, as the pupil called it, "long 
explessions." He rubbed up his own almost for- 
gotten arithmetical lore to teach this Samoan 
chiefling decimals; and sometimes by the unaccus- 
tomed fire — for the new house contained two fire- 
places, though these were seldom used — Henry 
was entertained with "the fairy tales of civiliza- 
tion." Lafaele, the steward, known in the house- 
hold as 'the archangel,' was, in spite of his 

[155] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

superstition and his dullness, another favourite; 
he was a great strong Hercules of a man, devoted 
to 'Papa,' as he called Stevenson, and capable of 
braving even the terrors of a dark night, with the 
spirits of the dead crowding, as he firmly believed, 
about his path, to come at his chief's bidding. 
Lafaele's wife, Fauma, Stevenson's "bronze candle- 
stick," was, if not particularly useful, ''highly 
decorative" and good-tempered. *'The weird fig- 
ure of Fauma," wrote Stevenson in one of his 
letters to Mr Colvin, "is in the room washing 
my windows, in a black lava-lava (kilt), with a 
red handkerchief hanging from round her neck 
between her breasts; not another stitch; her hair 
close-cropped and oiled." All the house-servants 
at Vailima went about bare-footed and very 
scantily clothed. Sosimo, the butler, who waited 
at table, wore only, on ordinary occasions, a 
piece of calico draping his tattooed waist and loins, 
but his bearing and manner had a noble dignity 
that made the attendance of this tall, brown- 
skinned, finely-formed native at Stevenson's beau- 
tifully appointed modern dinner-table appear 
not incongruous but picturesque. Sosimo was 
also Stevenson's faithful and devoted personal 
attendant, who delighted in performing any and 
every service that his master might require. On 
one occasion, Mrs Strong tells us, the cook was 
absent, and Stevenson therefore contented himself 
with ordering a luncheon of bread and cheese. But 
at the proper time Sosimo served up an excellent 

[156] 



Vailima 

omelette, a good salad, and perfect coffee. ''Who 
cooked this?" asked Stevenson; and Sosimo 
replied, "I did." "Then great is your wisdom," 
said his master; but Sosimo bowed his fine head 
and answered, "Great is my love." 

There were, as a rule, six or eight servants in 
the house and three or four outside men, who 
worked with a gang of hired labourers, which 
varied, according to the work in hand, from six to 
thirty. The Samoan works best under a strict 
and orderly system, and this Stevenson was at 
pains to establish. Outdoors and indoors a fixed 
daily routine was followed. Each servant had his 
list of duties and knew that their exact fulfilment 
would be insisted upon. Nothing delighted Steven- 
son more than to see among the members of this 
considerable household signs of the development of 
a clan spirit, such as had formerly existed among 
the Highlanders of his native country. To bring 
this to perfection was the ideal he set before him- 
self, and to which, in a great measure, he at- 
tained. His people learned to come to him for 
advice in their private and domestic matters, and 
he directed, reprimanded and praised, entering 
into their affairs with the keenest interest, and 
by his quick sympathy speedily appreciating the 
native point of view, and learning to deal wisely 
with native prejudices. He attempted to create 
common interests and common ambitions. He 
punished, when punishments were necessary, in 
the sight of the whole community. For slight 

[157] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

offences fines were imposed, which were handed 
over to the charities of the rehgious denomina- 
tion to which the offender belonged; or if he did 
not choose to submit to this, he might be paid 
his wages, and depart. In more serious cases a 
solemn Bed of Justice was held. Stevenson sat at 
the head of the table, with members of his family 
on either hand. The servants made a ring upon 
the floor. Evidence was given, and the verdict 
pronounced; and then came what was considered 
the heaviest part of the guilty man's punishment. 
The 'high chief addressed him at length, dwelling 
on the heinousness of his fault, and the grief it 
had caused to all the household. "Fuaali," said 
Stevenson on one such occasion, '^yow have con- 
fessed that you stole the cooked pigs, the taro, 
the palusamis, the bread-fruit, and fish that fell 
to Vailima's portion at yesterday's feast. Your 
wish to eat pig was greater than your wish to be 
a gentleman. ... It is easy to say that you are 
sorry, that you wish you were dead; but that is 
no answer. We have lost far more than a few 
dozen baskets of food; we have lost our trust in 
you, which used to be so great, our confidence in 
your loyalty and high-chief ness." And so on, 
dwelling on the enormity of the fault and the 
shame that it had brought on Vailima. The 
punishment pronounced was that the value of the 
stolen food should be deducted from Fuaali's 
wages, and that when the whole amount was in 
hand, he should make a feast, to which he should 

[158] 



Vailima 

invite not his own friends but the friends of those 
faithful servants of the house whom he had tried, 
but vainly, to corrupt. 

Stevenson's wise and kindly rule soon began to 
have its effect. The 'boys' were proud of belong- 
ing to Vailima, and willing to do anything to 
uphold the honour of the house. When, in 
November 1890, they went down to a feast in 
Apia, they went of their own accord in the Vailima 
uniform — white shirt, red-and- white blazer, and 
lava-lava of the Stuart tartan — and formed 
themselves into a company instead of going each 
man to join his own village. Their master was 
highly gratified at this open declaration of their 
allegiance. 

As soon as the difficulties connected with the 
service of the house had been surmounted, the 
daily life of Vailima ran smoothly enough. Steven- 
son was usually stirring before the dawn began to 
break over the *' down-hill profile of the eastern 
road," and had often been working for more than 
an hour when, somewhere about six o'clock, one 
of the 'boys' brought him a light breakfast. If 
the weather was cold — cold, that is, for Samoa, 
where a morning temperature of 70° produced a 
sensation of discomfort, in contrast to the greater 
heat of the day — he sometimes worked in bed. 
He used the Samoan bed of mats, with a pillow 
and a blanket, and sang its praises vigorously. 
When the weather was warm he went out on the 
verandah and looked with the rapture of spirit 

[159] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

that pure and perfect beauty always aroused 
in him at the glories of the tropic day. By seven 
the whole household was astir, but Stevenson was 
usually left to work uninterruptedly at his writ- 
ing until near eleven o'clock, when the loud boom- 
ing of the pu or great conch shell blown in the 
verandah called the family to luncheon. After- 
ward came a ride or a walk, a game of tennis, or 
some other recreation; dinner at half -past five, 
then cards, music or reading, until, a little after 
eight, the members of the family went to their 
rooms. Stevenson generally read for an hour or 
so, but was nearly always in bed by ten o'clock. 
This is an outline plan of Stevenson's day, but 
it was subject to so many and such great varia- 
tions that the only two points which can be re- 
garded as fairly fixed and constant are the hour 
of rising and the hour of going to bed. Time had 
to be found for all those duties that belonged to 
'Stevenson the Planter,' and often 'Stevenson 
the Writer,' too, became unduly importunate in 
his claims. When work of special interest was 
going on and enthusiasm and inspiration were in 
full tide, Stevenson would give the whole day to 
his writing; and even at ordinary times there 
were usually some hours in the afternoon or even- 
ing when he worked in one fashion or another 
upon the book then in progress. On the other 
hand, entire days were sometimes spent in long 
expeditions or in attendance at native festivals. 
There was, also, a constant stream of guests com- 

[ 160] 



Vailima 

ing and going at Vailima, and when a large dinner 
was to be given the whole family was kept at work 
from early morning 'dressing the ship.' Steven- 
son always undertook the preparation of 'the 
crystal/ and was as happy as man could be polish- 
ing decanters and glasses until they reached such a 
state of dazzling brightness that even the silver 
set out on the festal table in the great hall could 
not outshine them. 

This great hall was the centre of life at Vailima, 
and its master's constant pride. Its walls and 
ceiling were covered with varnished redwood from 
California, its waxed floor was bare except for the 
huge tiger- skin rugs which were objects of great 
interest to the Samoans. *'I suppose," a little 
native boy once said to Mrs Strong, "that there 
are many animals like that in the forests of 
London." All the family treasures were collected 
within this great hall. There was a portrait of 
old Robert Stevenson and a large picture of Skerry- 
vore Lighthouse. There was Stevenson's portrait 
by Sargeant, and his bust by Rodin, and Mr 
Colvin's portrait sent out from England. Many 
mementoes of the South Sea cruises were there, 
showing somewhat strangely against a sideboard 
set out with silver. A safe was built into one 
corner of the hall, and here money and valuables 
were stored; and the natives firmly believed that 
within this safe dwelt the 'Bottle Imp' on whom 
Stevenson's fortune depended. On his first com- 
ing to Samoa he had caused his story "The Bottle 

[161] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

Imp" to be translated into the native language by 
one of the missionaries of the island, with all of 
whom he was on terms of cordial friendship; and 
it had been published in a paper issued by the 
London Missionary Society and read by the Samo- 
ans before it was heard of in England. It was 
through this story that Stevenson's native name 
of 'Tusitala' (Teller of Tales) — by which one of 
the missionaries, the Rev. J. Newell, had intro- 
duced him to the Samoans — was permanently 
adopted. 

On Sunday evenings Stevenson conducted a 
religious service in the great hall. A chapter 
from the Samoan Bible was read, and Samoan 
hymns were sung; then came a prayer in English, 
usually one written by Stevenson, and, finally, the 
Lord's Prayer in Samoan. Stevenson wrote many 
prayers for the use of his household at Vailima, 
and the tone and temper of the daily life can 
scarcely be better indicated than by reference to 
his "Prayer at Morning." He prays that the 
round of small duties that begins with the new 
day may be performed bravely and cheerfully, 
that laughter, kindness and mirth may abound 
with industry, and that when the day is ended 
tired workers may have quiet rest. 

With the native population outside his own 
household Stevenson's position was one of weight 
and authority. He and his family were always 
careful to observe those small points of etiquette 
that meant so much to the Samoans, and he won 

[162] 




< 
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O 

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Vailima 

their hearts as much by his thoughtful courtesy 
as by his active kindness. A very large part of 
his valuable morning hours was taken up in re- 
ceiving chiefs who came to obtain help in their 
difficulties from the "chief house of wisdom." 
His ruling was accepted on political questions and 
on trifling local disputes. Money collected for a 
special purpose was entrusted to him, with a 
request that he would see the purpose carried out; 
and in the troublous times that came in 1893 he 
was besieged on all sides by those who wanted 
news of the latest developments, and those who 
wanted to know what course to take to ensure 
their own safety. Stevenson would sigh, Lloyd 
Osbourne tells us, when he saw the chiefs ap- 
proaching the house in their stately, solemn 
fashion, but he never refused to see them and, 
as far as he could, to help them. 

In the political dissensions that divided the 
island Stevenson took a keen interest. He was 
from the beginning the friend of the deposed 
Mataafa, who was proclaimed a rebel in October 
1891, but whom he recognized as being a man of 
greater ability and higher character than Laupepa, 
the nominee of the allied Powers. But he was 
not in any sense a partisan. He aimed, in single- 
ness of mind, at the establishment of good govern- 
ment in the island, and he considered that the 
chief obstacles to this were the two officials 
appointed by the Berlin Convention — the Chief 
Justice, a Swedish gentleman named Cedarkrantz, 

C 163] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

and the President of the Council, Baron Leufft 
von Pilsuch. He did everything he could to pro- 
cure the withdrawal of these gentlemen, and this 
although he had a strong personal liking for 
Cedarkrantz. They on their side were equally 
anxious to get rid of him, and made strenuous 
efforts, by reports to the allied Powers of the mis- 
chievous results of his interference in Samoan 
politics, to obtain an order for his deportation. 
For a time it seemed likely that they would suc- 
ceed, and Stevenson, realizing that at any moment 
his little kingdom might suddenly be left without 
a head, carefully prepared and wrote out instruc- 
tions for the guidance of his family in such an 
event. He relates with immense enjoyment a 
dramatic incident that took place just when the 
struggle was in its acutest stage. There was a 
ball given in Apia — one of the balls at which 
almost every class of the community was repre- 
sented. Stevenson was there and Cedarkrantz, 
and the two greeted each other with the punctili- 
ous politeness that Samoan etiquette demanded 
under the circumstances. A few days before 
Cedarkrantz had been trying to obtain evidence 
against the interfering chief of Vailima by bullying 
and threatening a half -white interpreter; and 
that very morning Stevenson had been engaged 
in writing one of those letters to the Times which 
had first called the attention of people in England 
to Samoan affairs, and in which he had stated in 
the plainest and most energetic terms his opinion 

[164] 



Vailima 

of the influence of Cedarkrantz upon the islands 
Nevertheless the two found themselves later on 
in the evening face to face in a quadrille — the 
sort of quadrille that was danced in Apia, "rackety 
and prancing and embracatory beyond words." 
They both tried hard, says Stevenson, to behave 
with becoming dignity, but the situation was too 
much for them. Their eyes met, and they grinned; 
confidential relations were established between 
them; and "for the remainder of that prance 
we pranced for each other. Hard to imagine 
any position more ridiculous." 

But in spite of his appreciation of such ridicu- 
lous episodes there was nothing of the detach- 
ment of the outsider in Stevenson's attitude toward 
Samoan politics. He quite calmly and knowingly 
put himself in danger of imprisonment or deporta- 
tion; he risked what was dearer to him than 
his own safety, the well-being of the little colony 
he had planted and nurtured; he gave himself 
endless trouble and fatigue in arranging deputa- 
tions, drawing up petitions, and writing letters 
to the Times; and he sacrificed ungrudgingly the 
time that meant bread for himself and his family. 
As a result of his efforts Cedarkrantz and Pilsuch 
were withdrawn in January 1893, but this did not 
end the troubles. "The triple-headed ass at 
home," as Stevenson called the allied Powers, 
still carried on the policy of the dismissed officials, 
and, as a consequence, the party of Mataafa rose 
in armed rebellion. Stevenson had laboured con- 

[ 165 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

sistently for peace; but when, in spite of all that 
he could do, war broke out, that high adventur- 
ous spirit which neither years, nor ill-health, nor 
hardships had done anything to quell, leapt up 
and exulted at the sound of the trumpet. He 
rode with his cousin, Graham Balfour, who had 
come out to Vailima for a long visit, through the 
Mataafa villages, and marked the activity and 
excitement that had transformed old men into 
boys, and boys into steadfast warriors. "The 
impression on our minds," he says, "was extraor- 
dinary; the sight of . . . those ardent, happy 
faces whirls in my head; the old aboriginal awoke 
in both of us and knickered like a stallion." He 
chafed at his own enforced inaction; but he knew 
that if he allowed himself to be drawn into the 
struggle any power that he might otherwise have 
had of helping the rebels would be taken from 
him. Yet it was hard to keep quiet. "War is 
a huge entrainement; there is no other tempta- 
tion to be compared to it, not one. We were all 
wet; we had been about five hours in the saddle, 
mostly riding hard; and we came home like 
schoolboys — with such a lightness of spirits, and 
I am sure such a brightness of eye as you could 
have lit a candle at!" 

The war was short and inglorious. Mataafa's 
forces were defeated in the first engagement. 
The allied Powers sent a warship with orders to 
suppress the insurgent chief at once, and in a few 
days it was all over. Mataafa was in exile, and 

[166] 



Vailima 

the Mataafa villages were destroyed, the whole 
being accomplished with such unnecessary cruelty 
and outrage — tacitly, at least, if not openly, 
sanctioned by the white authorities — as filled 
Stevenson with shame and anger. There was 
nothing to be done, however, but submit, and 
Stevenson had to content himself with showing 
every kindness in his power to the Mataafa chiefs 
who had been taken prisoners. When the British 
man-of-war brought the chiefs to Apia, Stevenson 
was the first who boarded the ship to greet them. 
He sent down his servants loaded with baskets of 
food; he visited the prisoners when, having been 
flogged through the streets and suffered every 
species of insult, they were at last harboured in 
the foul hole that served for a jail; he brought 
doctors to them, and supplied them with all the 
comforts possible to their miserable position; he 
had the filthy prison cleansed. Finally, he brought 
the officials, through shame, to provide for them 
food and lodging that had some approach to 
wholesomeness and decency, and he laboured 
hard to get the decree that imposed the forfeiture 
of their goods reversed. To show their gratitude 
the chiefs invited him and his family to a native 
feast at the jail, and loaded them with presents. 
Later, they gave a more signal mark of their 
appreciation of his services, and of the risks he 
had run in openly befriending a proscribed party. 
Almost as soon as they were released from prison, 
in September 1894, nine of them came up to 

[167] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

Vailima for a consultation. They sat in a solemn 
circle on the floor of the hall, and made known 
their intentions to Stevenson and his assembled 
family. He had, they said, done much to improve 
their position in prison and to hasten their release, 
and they had been considering what they could 
do in return. They had decided to make, with 
their own hands and the hands of their families, 
a road from the house at Vailima as far as the 
public way to Apia, to bear all charges and to 
supply their own food while the work was going 
on; and Tusitala was especially notified that 
none of the customary 'presents' would be ac- 
cepted. Mrs Strong describes how the "talking 
man" of the party began with the usual formal 
expressions and the usual Samoan composure of 
countenance, but when he began to speak of the 
love and gratitude they bore to Tusitala, of how 
they prayed for him and cherished the memory of 
his kindness, his calmness broke down, and he 
spoke with strong and real emotion. The whole 
incident touched Stevenson very deeply. Road- 
making was the most detested task of any in the 
whole island, and it was diflScult to find men who, 
either for the desire of high wages or the fear of 
punishment, would undertake it. But the chiefs 
entered on their task with the heartiest good-will 
and good-humour. In a few weeks the road was 
finished, and was known henceforward as 'Ala 
Loto Alofa,' the Road of the Loving Heart. 
Stevenson invited all the workers and their friends 

[168] 



Vailima 

to a feast, and made to them a speech that em- 
bodies all his feeling for Samoa and his ideals and 
hopes for its future. "I love the land," he said. 
"I have chosen it to be my home while I live, 
and my grave after I am dead; and I love the 
people, and have chosen them to be my people, 
to live and die with." 

It might seem that to rule and guide a large 
household, to superintend a plantation, and to 
take an active part in public affairs was enough 
to employ the time and the energies of any ordi- 
nary man. But the main business of Stevenson's 
life during the years at Vailima has as yet been 
scarcely touched upon. Through all his cares 
and occupations his literary work went steadily 
on. He was, before anything else, a writer, and 
it was from his writing that the income enabling 
him to support the great expense of his Vailima 
estate was gained. The plantation, in spite of 
his hopeful anticipations that it would in the 
course of five or six years provide him with an 
income, never became self-supporting. He had 
not the commercial instinct that could turn such 
an undertaking to profit, and he would not allow 
on his plantation the methods of dealing with 
native workers and of cutting down expenses that 
were practised elsewhere. 

The South Sea book dragged on heavily all 
through 1891 and 1892. In April, as a relief 
from this distasteful labour, Stevenson took up 
again "The High Woods of Ulufanua," which 

C 169 ] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

had been dropped because he thought the story 
on which it was founded too fantastic and extrav- 
agant. But on re-reading he fell in love with the 
first chapter, and decided that, for good or evil, 
it must be finished. He worked at it at intervals 
during the next five months, and by the end of 
September it was finished, the *yarn,' as he put 
it, having been 'cured,' and the title changed to 
"The Beach of Falesa." The Wrecker was com- 
pleted by the middle of November, and in 1892 
began its course as a serial story in Scribner's 
Magazine. Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Mr 
Colvin, a selection from Stevenson's published 
essays was made, which appeared the next year 
under the title of Across the Plains. 

In October Stevenson, moved by the unhappy 
state of public affairs in Samoa, and hoping to 
draw the attention of the people at home in 
England to the misgovernment that was doing so 
much mischief, began to write, against time, A 
Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in 
Samoa. It was, as he explained to Colvin, journal- 
ism rather than literature. He worked at it with 
the intense and honest conviction that he was 
fulfilling a plain duty toward the people among 
whom he had made his home. He looked for 
no profit or honour arising from it, and prophesied 
that its fate would be "to bloom unread in shop 
windows." He laboured hard, hoping to finish 
it by March; but May had come before the little 
book of two hundred and thirty-three pages was 

C 170] 



Vailima 

ready for publication, and he feared that it would 
appear just too late to be of use. It is a sober, 
reasoned piece of work, the first serious attempt 
to unravel the tangle of Samoan politics. 

The months, however, had produced other fruit 
besides this "weariful history." The creative 
power had been active, and when his piece of 
journalistic drudgery was finally off his hands, 
there were five stories planned out — two of them 
partly written — on which Stevenson was longing 
to be at work. These were The Young Chevalier, 
the plot of which had been suggested in a letter 
from Mr Andrew Lang; Sophia Scarlet, a "regular 
novel," the scene laid in a big South Sea planta- 
tion; *'The Shovels of Newton French," a story 
of the Peninsular War; The Pearl Fisher, written 
in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne; and David 
Balfour. This last story he had begun in Febru- 
ary, when the weakness that followed an attack 
of Samoa colic had forced him to give himself a 
holiday from the "History." He "slid," as he 
says, into David Balfour, taking up the history of 
his hero after having "left him five years in the 
British Linen Company's office." At once the 
rapture of inception, such as he had felt on the 
shores of the Saranac lake at the first idea of The 
Master of Ballantrae, took hold on him. The tale 
interfered with his sleeping and his eating; and, 
in spite of the pressure of other work, before the 
end of the month the whole story was planned 
out and fifteen chapters written. This was one 

[171] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

of the periods when political matters were specially 
pressing, but, in spite of all interruptions, David 
Balfour "went skelping along." With a spell of 
The Young Chevalier interposed by way of "a 
holiday outing," it progressed without other 
interruption than those occasioned by the political 
business that was absorbing many hours of Steven- 
son's time each day; until, in July, the scrivener's 
cramp, which had attacked him eight years before, 
once more threatened him and made writing both 
painful and difficult. His step-daughtei', Mrs 
Strong, came to his assistance; he dictated, and 
she wrote, and again the work went forward. 
"This is a great invention," said Stevenson, '*to 
which I shall stick if it can be managed." Man- 
aged it was. Mrs Strong cheerfully devoted her- 
self to his service, and from that time forward 
became his quick and able amanuensis, so that 
his literary work suffered scarcely at all, while 
his hand was greatly benefited by this relief from 
constant exertion. But he would not allow him- 
self to depend entirely on such assistance, and 
when the cramp became less painful took up his 
own pen again. We hear of him gallantly copying 
out portions of David Balfour with his left hand, 
"a most laborious task," as he acknowledged. 
By the end of September the book was done, 
"and its author along with it, or nearly so." 
"Strange," he says, "to think of even our doctor 
here repeating his nonsense about debilitating 
climate. Why, the work I have been doing during 



Vailima 

the last twelve months, in one continuous spate, 
mostly with annoying interruptions, and without 
any collapse to mention, would be incredible in 
Norway. But I have broken down now, and will 
do nothing as long as I possibly can." 

An attack of illness followed, but, a pressing 
affair cropping up, he was able, as he said, to 
put it in his pocket, and go down to Apia day 
after day and attend to the troublesome business. 
His general health had indeed greatly improved, 
but nevertheless he sorely needed the rest that he 
refused to give himself, and the evil effects of this 
incessant work were soon to be seen. By the end 
of October he was all on fire once more with the 
idea for a new novel. He left for a time all the 
other schemes that he had in hand, and gave his 
days to Weir of Ilermiston. He could think and 
talk of nothing else, and as the whole story shaped 
itself in his brain, and the characters came to life 
and began to play their parts, the joy of creation 
entirely possessed him. He had never, he said, 
in any other work felt so sure of himself; Ilermis- 
ton would be his greatest book. But this first 
phase being passed, Weir of Ilermiston was put on 
one side for other matters more immediately call- 
ing for attention. A selection of short stories 
dealing with the South Seas, and called The Island 
Nights' Entertainment, was to be published, and 
Stevenson was soon hard at work completing and 
retouching those he had in hand. Then there 
were the proofs of David Balfour, which was 

C 1'73] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

running as a serial story in Atalanta, and arrange- 
ments had to be made for its publication in book 
form under the title of Catriona. Toward the 
end of December work was interrupted by an 
attack of fever followed by acute dyspepsia, and 
the new year opened with an epidemic of in- 
fluenza which attacked eight members of the 
Vailima household, including its master. A haem- 
orrhage, though happily not a very serious one, 
accompanied the influenza, and recovery was slow. 
The illness, however, had what Stevenson called 
"a huge alleviation," in the shape of an idea for 
a new story, which was to be called St Ives, with 
a subtitle, Experiences of a French Prisoner in 
England. He could not write, so he dictated the 
opening chapters to *the Amanuensis,' as he began 
jokingly to call Mrs Strong. So bent was he upon 
continuing his story, that when at one stage of 
his illness he was forbidden to speak for fear of a 
return of the haemorrhage, he dictated by means 
of the deaf and dumb alphabet. Mrs Strong 
caught his enthusiasm, and the two laboured 
happily together until early in February, when, 
with Mrs Stevenson, they started out for 'a 
month's lark,' which took the form of a voyage 
to Sydney and a stay of two or three weeks there. 
It was hoped that the change would reestablish 
Stevenson's health, but, as usual, Sydney did 
not suit him, and he caught a succession of colds 
that ended in pleurisy. The voyage home did 
something toward setting him up, and as soon as 

[174] 



Vailima 

he reached his own "beautiful, shining, windy 
house," for which in the streets of Sydney he 
had longed, he was able to begin work once 
more. 

Stevenson by this time was making an income 
far in excess of the seven hundred pounds which 
he had once said was as much as anybody could 
possibly want. In 1892 he had earned about 
£4000, and there was every likelihood that 1893 
would be yet more prosperous. He was not, 
however, free from money worries. His expenses 
were very great, and he found that, considerable 
as were his earnings, his outgoings nearly equalled 
them. The responsibility of his family weighed 
heavily upon him, and urged him on to work when 
he had neither the strength nor the inclination. 
"What I want," he said, "is the * income' that 
really comes in of itself, while all you have to do 
is just to blossom and exist and sit on chairs." 
But the time for this was not yet. For a few 
weeks after his return to Vailima the drudgery of 
proof-reading occupied him, and he had, as he 
said, a "heart-breaking time" over the final 
corrections of David Balfour. Before this was 
quite finished he took up again The Pearl Fisher, 
which he now rechristened The Ebb Tide. This 
story, the grimmest that Stevenson ever wrote, 
had been begun in collaboration with Lloyd Os- 
bourne, who had joined in drawing out the plan 
of the story, written the first four chapters and 
worked with Stevenson on the remaining chapters 

[175] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

of the first half of the book. Stevenson now set 
to work to finish the story by himself. The work 
was hateful to him; he felt more strongly than 
any reader can do the tragic horror of those last 
painful pages; but the dark story must be worked 
out to its inevitable conclusion, and so, with stress 
and suffering, the end was written. "I have 
spent," wrote Stevenson, "thirteen days about as 
nearly in Hell as a man could expect to live 
through." He turned for relief to a work happier 
and more wholesome in tone, which he had begun 
as far back as 1891, and which, according to his 
usual custom, he had put by and taken up from 
time to time, when the mood for it was upon him. 
This was a record of three generations of his own 
family, which he at first purposed calling The 
Lives of the Stevensons, but which finally appeared 
as A Family of Engineers. It was just at this time 
that war became imminent in Samoa, and for more 
than a month his letters make no mention of his 
literary work, if any such was done, but are filled 
with the pitiful details of a futile struggle in 
which, to the writer's shame, white men played 
but an ignoble part. In August he writes that 
he has been "recasting the beginning of the Hang- 
ing Judge or Weir of Hermiston,^^ and "cobbling 
on my grandfather." A little later he is "deep 
in St Ives/' and expects that this will be the next 
novel done. But by December the effect of hard 
and continuous labour had made some rest an 
absolute necessity. Hitherto illness had never 

[176] 



Vailima 

affected his brave and happy outlook on life; but 
now there were signs that a deep depression was 
beginning to settle upon him. He grew anxious 
and careful, supersensitive to criticism, and apt 
to allow a chance wounding word to rankle within 
him in a way which showed that some change was 
affecting the kindly sweetness of his nature. 
Work went heavily, and there came times when 
he was ready to believe that his literary gift had 
been finally lost. Yet he would not give himself 
the complete rest that, time after time, was pre- 
scribed for him. It was the old cry — money, for 
the sake of his family, he must have. His friends 
at home, Colvin and Mr Charles Baxter, recog- 
nizing the note of unaccustomed despondency in 
his letters, telegraphed out to him news of the 
great success of the Edinburgh edition of his 
works, which had lately been published, and which 
promised to afford a regular and assured income. 
But even this did not induce him to rest. He 
took up Weir of Hermiston once more, and dic- 
tated to Mrs Strong those wonderful chapters 
which show his powers at their very highest, 
and indicate, as most of his critics believe, that 
he was entering upon a fuller and richer stage 
in the development of his genius. Once more 
the fervour of inspiration returned; for months 
he had walked heavily, with dragging, weary 
feet; now once more he stepped out lightly and 
gallantly. He dictated, according to Mrs Strong, 
without pause or hesitation, "as clearly and 

[ 177] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

steadily as though he was reading from an un- 
seen book." 

During all the time that he spent at Vailima 
Stevenson never once, as it seems, contemplated 
a return to England, even for a short visit, but 
he was constantly making plans to meet one or 
other of his friends at various places — Egypt, 
Ceylon, Honolulu, Vailima itself. Not one of 
these plans came to anything; his friends were 
busy men who could not get away from their 
duties for a period long enough to take such a 
journey, and from the day on which he sailed on 
the Ludgate Hill he never saw one of his old com- 
panions again, except Mr W. H. Low, from whom 
he parted in New York. Mr Charles Baxter was 
on his way out to visit Vailima when he heard 
the news of Stevenson's death. 

The loss of the comradeship which had been 
even more to him than it is to most men at times 
weighed heavily upon him; at times, also, he 
felt an exile's home-sickness for the land of his 
birth, and for "the quaint, grey-castled city, where 
the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, 
and the salt showers fly and beat." "Did you 
see," he wrote to Colvin, "a man who wrote the 
Stickit Minister, and dedicated it to me, in words 
that brought the tears to my eyes every time I 
looked at them, 'Where about the graves of the 
martyrs the whaups are crying. His heart re- 
members how.' Ah, by God, it does! Singular 
that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, 

[178] 



Vailima 

and live a voluntary exile, and have my head 
filled with the blessed, beastly place all the 
time." ^ Yet he would never allow his friends to 
pity him, or to depreciate the land he had chosen 
for his home. "Why, you madman," he replied 
to some such condolences from Colvin, " I wouldn't 
change my present installation for any post, dig- 
nity, honour, or advantage conceivable to me. 
It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time." 

His little circle at Vailima saw little of the 
desponding moods that had alarmed his friends 
at home. To them he was still the gay and 
tender comrade that he had always been, the 
eternal boy among them who kept up the zest 
and excitement of living. He joined in all the 
gaieties of Apia, and went to lunches and balls 
given by the officers and men of his favourite 
warship, the Curaqoa, then stationed at Samoa. 
He organized and took part in a paper-chase, and 
related with great glee how, although he followed 
"every false scent on the whole course," he came 
in third on his "little Jack, who stuck to it gal- 
lantly." "I felt myself about seventeen again," 
he said; "a pleasant experience." He was im- 
mensely touched and delighted by the action of 
the chiefs, who, throughout September, were work- 
ing at the Road of the Loving Heart; and the 
rekindling of his interest in Weir of Hermiston 
brought him the joy of successful, happy labour 
that he appreciated beyond all others. On his 

^ Vailima Letters. 

[179] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

birthday the customary native feast was held, 
and he entertained his guests with his own 
delightful courtesy. 

December came, with Weir of Hermiston still 
going happily on. Monday, the third day of the 
month, was mail day, and all the afternoon 
Stevenson was occupied in writing letters to his 
friends at home. When, at sunset, he joined the 
rest of the family on the verandah he was in the 
gayest spirits. He talked over plans for the fu- 
ture, and especially about a lecturing tour in 
America that he was eager to make; he joked with 
his wife, who had all day been oppressed by a 
presentiment of coming evil, and drew her to 
join with him in preparations for making of their 
evening meal a little festival. Suddenly he put 
both hands to his head, and cried out, "What's 
that?" and then, quickly, "Do I look strange?" 
and fell on his knees before his wife. Sosimo, 
his faithful attendant, came running in, and helped 
Mrs Stevenson to carry him into the great hall 
and put him into the arm-chair, where he lay 
unconscious, but breathing heavily. Doctors were 
hurriedly sent for, and two soon arrived. Every- 
thing their knowledge and skill could suggest 
was done, but with no avail. The master of the 
house, the centre and mainspring of all its activi- 
ties, was dying. 

Loving hands lifted the unconscious form and 
laid it down gently upon a bed that had been 
brought in and placed in the middle of the hall. 

[180] 



Vailima 

As the dire news spread over the estate, awe- 
stricken native servants stole silently in and 
seated themselves in a wide semi-circle on the floor, 
their dark, anxious faces all turned toward their 
chief, the well-loved Tusitala. His wife and the 
other members of his family gathered in anguish 
round his bed, and his missionary friend, Mr 
' Clarke, who had come hurrying to Vailima at the 
news of the attack, knelt and prayed aloud. The 
deep, painful breaths grew slower and fainter, 
then ceased. Robert Louis Stevenson was dead. 

Silently his native servants went about the last 
sad duties they owed to their dead chief. The 
great Union Jack that his loyal heart had loved 
to see floating over the walls he had built in a 
strange land was hauled down and placed over his 
body; and under that symbol of home the Scots- 
man who was no more an exile lay at rest. His 
servants each knelt and reverently kissed the dead 
hand of their master. Not one could be induced 
to take any rest all through that long, sad night. 
There was no loud lamentation, but their mourn- 
ful faces and dejected bearing showed how heavily 
this loss had fallen upon them. They sat silent, 
or chanted in a mixture of Latin and Samoan the 
long, solemn prayers that the Romish Church has 
ordained for use in the chamber of death, till 
the dawn came and brought in the day on which 
Tusitala must be laid in his grave. 

Many feet trod that morning the Road of the 
Loving Heart, and chief after chief brought the 

[181] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

customary offering of a fine mat to lay upon 
the body of the dead. Flowers, too, were brought, 
brilliant tropical flowers that filled the great hall 
with a blaze of colour. 

An old Mataafa chief, one of those who had 
been in prison and who had afterward helped in 
building the road, came among the others; and 
as he crouched beside the dead body of Tusitala, 
he lamented over him in touching words. "I 
am only a poor Samoan, and ignorant," he said, 
"others are rich and can give Tusitala the parting 
presents of rich, fine mats; I am poor, and can 
give nothing this last day he receives his friends. 
Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last 
time in my friend's face, never to see him more 
till we meet with God. . . . We were in prison, 
and he cared for us. W^e were sick, and he made 
us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The 
day was no longer than his kindness. You are 
great people, and full of love. Yet who among 
you is so great as Tusitala .f^ What is your love 
to his love.^"^ 

Near at hand the grave was being prepared. 
Stevenson was to be buried in the place that he 
himself had chosen when he knew that he could 
not be laid with his fathers, "where the whaups 
and the plovers were crying," in the bleak Scotch 
graveyard at home. On the top of Vaea there is 
a small tableland no larger than a room; and 
here was to be his resting-place. No path led up 

* The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 

[ 182] 



Vailima 

to the steep side of the mountain, so forty of those 
who had gathered to offer their services were sent 
to hew one out with knives and axes, while a band 
of the Vaihma servants, headed by Lloyd Os- 
bourne, dug the grave on the summit. 

The coffin, quickly made by the skilful hands 
of an old friend, was ready by noon, and Sosimo 
reverently placed the body of his master within 
it, posing the dead hands in the attitude of prayer. . 
Then the tattered red ensign that had gone with 
him in his South Sea voyagings was laid upon the 
coffin, and it was borne on the shoulders of power- 
ful Samoans up the steep path to the mountain 
top. The ascent was a work of almost incredible 
labour and difficulty, and each slow and painful 
step that brought them nearer to the summit 
tried most severely the strength of the devoted 
bearers. In all nineteen Europeans and about 
sixty Samoans assembled at the grave, where the 
Rev. W. E. Clarke read the Burial Service of the 
Church of England; and there, on the top of the 
mountain that had guarded his home, Robert 
Louis Stevenson was laid to rest. 

His grave is marked by a tomb, built, in Sa- 
moan fashion, of great blocks of cement. On 
either side is a bronze plate. One bears in Sa- 
moan the words, "The Tomb of Tusitala." 
"Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou 
lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my 
people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, 
will I die, and there will I be buried." 

[183] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

On the other plate is written in English two 
verses from his own "Requiem," with his name 
and the date of his birth and his death: 

ROBERT LOUIS 
1850 STEVENSON 1894 

Under the wide and starry sky 
Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die. 
And I laid me down with a will. 

This be the verse you grave for me: 
Here he lies where he longed to be; 
Home is the sailor, home from the sea. 
And the hunter home from the hill. 



[184] 



EPILOGUE : The Writer 
and the Man 

THE time has not yet come for estimating 
Robert Louis Stevenson's influence upon 
English literature, or for allotting to him 
his permanent position in the ranks of English 
writers. All that is at present possible is to point 
out some of those qualities which constitute his 
claim to a place among the immortals; the final 
judgment must be pronounced by a later generation. 
The first and most striking of these qualities is 
his great range and versatility. He wrote essays, 
plays, novels, short stories, lyrics and blank verse, 
fables, lay sermons, and prayers; and his work 
shows as great a diversity in matter and manner 
as in form. That the same man wrote A ChiWs 
Garden of Verses and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; 
that Treasure Island is by the same hand as 
Ordered South; that the charming egoist who gave 
us Travels with a Donhey in the Cevennes could 
pass to the grim horror of The Ebb Tide; that 
the man who keeps us chuckling as he shows us 
David Balfour naively making his way through 
many dangers and difiiculties toward happiness 
and prosperity, can make our hearts hot with fu- 
tile rage as we follow the House of Durisdeer to 
its slow-approaching, inevitable doom, — these 
things seem almost beyond belief; and the wonder 
grows as the reader recognizes that each work is 
in its class a masterpiece. 

[185] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

This extraordinary versatility of the writer is 
simply a reflection of the many-sidedness of the 
man. Stevenson's range of interests was alto- 
gether remarkable for its width and its variety. 
He would occupy himself fearlessly with such 
stupendous and baflfling subjects as the mixture 
of good and evil in man, and for weeks the ideas 
to which these musings suggested would take 
possession of him, to the exclusion of almost every 
other thought. On the other hand the most 
trifling interest or occupation would for a time 
absorb all his energies. Mrs Strong tells us how 
once, when a fit of restlesssness had made him dis- 
inclined for his ordinary occupations, she taught 
him how to herring-bone saddle-blankets in red 
worsted, and how he became so intent upon ac- 
quiring this new art that he sat at his work during 
every available moment of a whole day, hurrying 
back to it after necessary interruptions, as to 
some great task. He flung himself upon each 
new thing that came under his observation as if 
that alone were the object of his desires and the 
goal of his energies. His brain was filled with 
the ideas that it suggested, and every power that 
he had was concentrated upon the effort to make 
it yield to him all that it was capable of yielding. 
It is true that when this was done he passed on 
eagerly to the next thing that presented itself; 
so that friends whom he had inspired with his 
own interest were often disconcerted when they 
returned after a short period of absence and found 

[186] 



The Worker and the Man 

that the subject they were eager to talk about 
was forgotten, and a new red-hot enthusiasm 
installed in its place. These quick changes were 
not, however, due to lightness or fickleness, but 
rather to the intensity and concentration which 
carried Stevenson swiftly through all those grada- 
tions of feeling which in the case of the ordinary 
man are passed as distinct stages. It is little 
wonder, therefore, that with such a temperament 
Stevenson could write and write well on so many 
and such varied subjects. 

The second striking feature of Stevenson's writ- 
ing is his distinctive and finished style. He has 
told us with what labour this was acquired; but 
it is, even in his earliest works, such a perfect 
instrument, and wielded with such delightful ease, 
that but for his confession we should be tempted 
to think that here was the born artist, the for- 
tunate legatee who had inherited all that his 
predecessors had accumulated of skill and experi- 
ence, and had added to this his own natural and 
effective charm. He himself has defined literature 
as " words used to the best purpose, with no waste, 
but going tight round a subject," and his works 
show how well his practice accorded with his 
theory. But he added to this essential quality of 
conciseness those other nameless graces that make 
his style a delight. One reads Stevenson slowly 

— his stories excepted, for in these the style must 
wait for the second, or perhaps the third reading 

— as one turns a delicious morsel on the palate, 

[187] 



Robeft Louis Stevenson 

loth to let the treat come too soon to an end. 
But this simile is too material in its character to 
express adequately the pleasure that Stevenson's 
airily-delightful style gives to us. One sentence 
is so exquisitely turned that it affords a gratifica- 
tion comparable to that which comes from the 
contemplation of a perfect piece of sculpture; 
the next contains such a felicitous epithet that 
the reader's consciousness goes out to meet it 
with a shock of acquiescence; the humour lurks 
so captivatingly behind the demure words that 
one stands, as it were, on tiptoe to catch a glimpse 
of it, and, meeting it full face by some unexpected 
turn in the way, goes gaily on with it, treading to 
the measure of light-hearted laughter — only to 
find, after a while, that one's companion is not 
Humour after all, but Pathos, her twin-sister. 

Yet that which even more than his wonderful 
style gives the peculiar charm to Robert Louis 
Stevenson's writing is the intimate personal rela- 
tion he sets up between the reader and himself. 
This is true not only of his autobiographical works 
— though of these pre-eminently — but of almost 
everything that he has written. It is as if he 
walked beside the reader in friendly talk, with 
hand laid, comrade-fashion, on the other's shoulder. 
We learn to know Stevenson as we know few other 
writers; and this is probably because he knew 
himself so well. He had a vivid and eager interest 
in his own personality, and when he was a man he 
still held a clear remembrance of the child, the 

[188] 



The Worker and the Man 

boy, and the youth that he once had been; so 
that he is able to make these known to his readers, 
and he grows dearer to us as we see him pass from 
one stage to another, just as a friend whose face 
we can see grows dearer with the passing years. 
The interest that we feel in Stevenson himself 
even rivals the interest that we feel in his books. 
If the verdict on the writer remain in suspense 
there can be no doubt regarding the verdict on 
the man. Robert Louis Stevenson's brave life 
has won for him a certain place in the great rank 
of heroes who are honoured in every land. It is 
no matter that, as he himself says, his battlefield 
was the dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the 
physic bottle. The cause was a fine one, and the 
victory splendid. The foe was one with whom 
all of us at some time or other must contend, 
though few are attacked with such persistency 
and fierceness as was Stevenson. We hear his 
cheery voice, and see him come smiling gaily 
from the hottest encounter, and we feel that to 
give way even an inch in our own small struggles, 
to allow our heart to be daunted or the face that 
we turn upon the glories of this beautiful world 
to be clouded, would be almost an act of treachery 
toward the brave and faithful soul who so gal- 
lantly defied the enemy's power to take from man 
the joy of living. To many of those who have 
tried to fight a good fight Robert Louis Steven- 
son's victory has come with sustaining power. 
"I remember," says Helen Keller, who herself 

[189] 



Robert Louis Stevenson 

has surmounted difficulties greater, perhaps, than 
have been surmounted by any other human being, 
"an hour when I was discouraged and ready to 
falter. For days I had been pegging away at a 
task which refused to get itself accomplished. 
In the midst of my perplexity I read an essay of 
Stevenson, which made me feel as if I had been 
* outing' in the sunshine. I tried again with new 
courage, and succeeded almost before I knew it. 
I have failed many times since; but I have never 
felt so disheartened as I did before that sturdy 
preacher gave me my lesson on the 'fashion of 
the smiling face.' " ^ 

Stevenson, we are told, always held, with Sir 
Walter Scott, that *'to have done things worthy 
to be written was a dignity to which no man made 
any approach who had only written things worthy 
to be read." In his humility it probably never 
occurred to him that he himself had '*done things 
worthy to be written"; but he was, in the best 
and truest sense of the words, a man of action as 
well as a man of letters, and it is as such that 
we remember him. 

* The Practice of Optimism. 



[190] 



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